A rare glimpse inside Elsa Peretti’s sprawling Spanish home

As Tiffany & Co celebrates 50 years of collaboration with Elsa Peretti, AnOther pays a visit to Sant Martí Vell – the Catalan village that the late jeweller spent her life restoring, and eventually made her permanent home.

When she was 21 years old, Elsa Peretti ran away from her home in Rome, severing ties with her father’s oil-and-energy fortune and the rigid conventions of Franco-era family life. Her path soon led her to Barcelona, where she immersed herself in the bohemian enclave of the ‘Gauche Divine’, among the liberal art movement’s luminaries like Salvador Dalí and Leopoldo Pomés. Despite her star growing in New York, she discovered Sant Martí Vell in Catalonia in 1968, and purchased a small home that looked over the town square. “In Sant Martí Vell I find the strength to continue my work, the peace I need, the inspiration for my forms,” Peretti once said.

In 1974, Peretti was introduced to the Tiffany & Co. team by her close friend and longtime collaborator, Halston. With the jewellery house, she transformed her sinuous, sensual forms into sterling silver, drawing from the natural beauty of her Mediterranean surroundings. Through the years she gradually acquired almost every property in the village. A network of winding underground galleries and air bridges connected the 27 buildings, which she lovingly restored and furnished with meticulous care. She chose to make it her full-time home in 2021, devoting herself to organising her vast archive, which she tucked into the hidden corners and storied walls of her residence. But before the project was complete, she passed away peacefully in her sleep, leaving the house as an unfinished yet profoundly personal testament to her vision. In a sense, the property became her final masterpiece.

Chock full of art, mementoes, locally commissioned furniture, books and rustic original features, it’s clear that her mind was reflected in her home, and her home reflected in her designs, which have been celebrated in Tiffany & Co’s special anniversary release, honouring 50 years of collaboration, reissuing some of the designer’s most beloved icons with exceptional gemstones and in bold scales.

Here, AnOther speaks with co-executive director of the Elsa Peretti Family Office and Peretti’s close collaborator Stefano Palumbo, who details five fascinating things in the jeweller’s sprawling Catalan residence.

Aviaries

“The freedom to fly was central to Elsa’s fascination with birds. At her death, Elsa had 35 birds, including canaries and goldfinches, living in large cages, filling her days with song. Outside her house, she planted berry-filled shrubs and placed water containers to attract birds of all species. In Rome, a crow grew fond of her, visiting her terrace regularly. For this crow, there was always a plate of spaghetti, which she particularly appreciated. Certainly, the cage is an obsessively recurring element in Peretti’s art collection. They embodied her personal credo: the choice to live uncaged. Though difficult and often misunderstood, it was a path she followed with unyielding perseverance.”

Paella Pans

“There were very few chosen ones who could share her table. Especially as the years passed, when friends of youth began to disappear one after another, the selection was very narrow. Long gone are the years of the great reunions with Joe Eula, Fernando Sanchez and Liza Minnelli in Sant Martì Vell around a paella in the middle of the garden of Casa Pequena. Yet three gigantic pots remain of them hanging on the wall of Can Noves’s monumental kitchen as a perpetual reminder of glorious times now gone.”

Pinboards

“These [pinboards] are works of art in the making, never completed, but constantly evolving. It is a collage of memories, artistic references, of small details filled with deep content. The result is a work of art and should be preserved as such. In an interview with the WSJ in 2018 Elsa says: ‘I live with these memories in front of me’. [There are] Photos taken by the great Catalan photographers in the late 1960s; Oriol Maspons photographing her in Port Lligat with Salvador Dalí; her King Charles spaniels, faithful companions of the roaring years in New York; Halston smoking a cigarette; Fred Hughes, Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise – a world of creative geniuses who helped build her artistic journey over the decades.”

The Art of Robert Llimós

“The Elsa Peretti Private Collection includes a group of 85 works by Robert Llimós, spanning his entire career. She supported him by collecting his works, providing him with artist residencies at Sant Martí Vell and promoting his oeuvre with exhibitions in Italy and Catalonia organised by her foundation. They met in Barcelona in the late 1960s, as they were both part of the avant-garde cultural scene of the time. She recognised in Robert Llimós a multidisciplinary artist who, in addition to his broad knowledge base in painting, also produced sculpture, textile art, graphic work, murals and performances. Elsa Peretti identified her own work with contemporary artists such as Robert Llimós, skilled in the exploration of both figurative and abstract forms, as well as in the use of a range of materials to express themselves.”

An Active Chapel

“Elsa was an extremely spiritual woman. This shows in her creations, but her religiosity was expressed in her own form of a kind of universal deism. Certainly, her Catholic Italian roots from the 1950s had a profound influence on her growth as an artist, but as she matured, her travels around the world, meeting people of all religions, opened her mind to a more universal form of spirituality, made up of great respect for cultures and histories different from her own. The Madonna, designed by Elsa, however, hung above the altar in the Sant Martí Vell Chapel [where her body now rests] defines Elsa’s past and present life. In a simple sign that defines the contours of the Holy Virgin’s veil, Elsa has managed to encapsulate all the mystery of motherhood, from which a powerful spirituality exudes. In Catholic culture it is very common to wear an image of the Virgin around the neck, but Elsa has been able to extract the feminine universe within her, transforming it into a universal message that unites women all over the world in a simple line that nevertheless says it all.”