All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In the heart of the Tuscan countryside, just 80 kilometers from central Florence, sits Villa Lena: an agriturismo (the increasingly popular Italian phenomenon of a farm-based holiday) that focuses, in equal measure, on organic agriculture and the arts. It’s the perfect place to go for a little bit of everything—its hiking trails are a nature lover’s dream, its locavore restaurant will sate anyone after authentic Italian “slow food,” and its artistic workshops are brilliant for people who can’t help but want to learn something on their vacation, as well as for those who don’t. (Its pool is also an oasis for tanning fiends.)
San Michele, the restaurant on the premises, sources most of its food from the farm that surrounds it, where vegetables are planted among olive groves for oil and vineyards producing red, white, and rosé prosecco. All the vegetables come from the gardens, which makes for delicious seasonal fare—something as simple as a mixed green salad transformed into a special event. That which isn’t grown on site, namely the meat and cheese, comes from hyper-local suppliers, while the pasta is, naturally, homemade.
The rooms, which accommodate 70 to 80 guests, are spread between a large villa for families and groups, two large apartments, and the fattoria, a former horse stables transformed into the main hotel building. Overlooking the green fields and mountains of Tuscany, the ground floor of the rustic fattoria is full of Italian modernist design and artwork selected by Lena, the hotel’s eponymous art collector owner. The rooms are spacious, with soaring ceilings, exposed wooden beams, and oversized bathtubs tucked underneath a window with a view.
The centerpiece of Villa Lena is the bright orange 19th-century villa, originally owned by an aristocratic family, which houses an artist’s residency, where eight artists live among the frescoes and antiques for a month at a time, while producing an artwork to leave in the hotel. Because of this, the hotel is decorated eclectically, with drawings, ceramics, paintings, and framed poems from the various residents’ stays.
.jpg)
The residents also offer workshops for guests inside the villa’s reception room. During my stay, there was a ceramics workshop, yoga, a pasta-making class, and a particularly fun lesson in making flower crowns using lilies, lavender, daisies, and other wildflowers grown in the Villa Lena gardens. Villa Lena also hosts more thematic retreats; later this year they will put on a weeklong flower arranging and ceramic course with a visiting florist from Berlin, where students will learn to make vessels and then arrange flowers in them which will make fantastic use of their fecund garden.
Personally, I visited Villa Lena for a natural perfume retreat led by the women behind Porcelain Perfumes, a Danish perfumer who blends scents without the use of any synthetics or chemicals. Their nose Stine Hoff was once a resident at Villa Lena and, as her parting memento designed the hotel’s signature scent, which includes a blend of citrus and herbal notes.
Stine began making natural perfumes when, after her pregnancy, she suddenly became allergic to the synthetic scents that are used in most commercial perfumes that replicate natural aromas (if you’ve ever smelled peach or watermelon in perfume, for example, you actually haven’t.) Though natural perfumes are blended from essential oils, the more complex ones—like Porcelain’s—smell nothing like the droplets you deposit into an aromatherapy diffuser. The blend of oils creates a chorus of scent that makes it difficult to identify each individual note, joining together to make something much more sophisticated like Porcelain’s Myristica, which has a seductive profile owing to its central ingredient, nutmeg.
%2520(1).jpg)
The retreat brought together an expert perfumer and a group of scent obsessives interested in making their own personal fragrance. After a lesson in perfume history and theory (who knew hundreds of years ago rich people had personal perfumers on staff, like chefs) Stine encouraged us to walk around in nature for the rest of the day, smelling everything we came across, and trying to think of what we wanted our perfume to evoke. Mark Connolly, the former style director of Condé Nast Traveler-turned-reiki practitioner sought to make a scent that embodies the “head chakra,” to use on clients as part of his healing practice. A romantic comedy screenwriter in the group was after the “scent of love.”
My own ambitions were much more humble: simply to make something that smelled nice. And under the guidance of Stine, I succeeded. I can’t stop sniffing my wrist to get a whiff of my blend of rose, basil, vetiver, cedar, bergamot, and lavender, which makes me feel like I am one of the bright yellow butterflies I saw flapping around the Tuscan garden.
As we created our perfumes, Stine told us that we process scent differently than our other senses. Smells travel straight to the limbic system, involuntarily triggering emotional memories. Sitting in the airport with a many hours delayed flight, I burrowed my nose into my wrist and inhaled deeply—I think my time at Villa Lena was too recent to go full Proust, but oh boy did my perfume smell good.
Booking details for Villa Lena:
