What was staring Harvey B-Brown and his husband, Steve Riseley, in the face was a graffiti-covered shell that had been abandoned for nearly a century. Built in the late 1800s, Castle Elvira in Puglia, Italy, had been given as a birthday present to a 17-year-old called Elvira. To thank her parents for her gift, the teenager prepared a feast using mushrooms she’d picked in the grounds. She died that night after eating one that was poisonous. Her grief-stricken parents sealed up the castle and left Puglia forever.
“We fell in love with it the second we saw it,” says B-Brown. “Or rather we fell in love with our vision of what it could be. Sometimes what you see in your mind’s eye is not what’s staring you in the face.”
“When we went to view it in 2018,” says Riseley, “we had to hack a path through 37 acres (15 ha) of wilderness and inside was a scene of total dereliction.”
Elvira’s interiors—its frescoed ceilings, cast-iron filigree window grates, parquet floors—had been looted, vandalized, or ravaged by the elements. The stairs had rotted away. Winds howled through its pane-less windows; birds nested in its pink turrets.
Turning the castle into a residence and hotel was a far bigger undertaking than the couple had anticipated. “We were bewitched by Elvira, obsessed, blinded by love—and our decisions were driven by the desire to recapture and honor its intrinsic character,” says B-Brown.
“We wanted to preserve what was there, such as the murals on the ceilings, and to restore what we could salvage or, if we couldn’t do that, to find craftsmen who could build traditional stone walls, work iron, and make banisters and stairs from bare wood, which proved a painful process.
“We were swept up by the dream, but when reality bit, it bit hard—the sheer scale of what we had to do caused many sleepless nights.
“Castle renovation is not for the faint hearted. It takes stamina, tenacity, and huge emotional and financial resources. It takes imagination—how are you going to install heating and air conditioning and all the necessities and luxuries of 21st-century living in a 19th-century building without disrupting its appearance?
“Our smart televisions are integrated into retro-style mirrors and we used the most advanced under-floor heating and air cooling system. And then there are the regulations and the red tape, and the fact that different restrictions can apply to different parts of the estate, depending on its age.
“But when we see how much our guests love Elvira, we’re so glad we didn’t take any short cuts.”
