A 500-Year-Old Village in the Chianti Hills Gets a Very Un-Rural Interior

Tuscany usually sells itself in terracotta and lavender. Chapter Chianti opens with travertine and sculptural steel.

Chapter Chianti opened this summer inside a restored sixteenth-century borgo set across roughly ninety-nine acres of the Chianti hills, forty-five minutes from both Florence and Siena. It is the second property from Chapter Italia, the portfolio built by Marco Cilia after Chapter Roma opened in 2019, and the first to move the brand out of a city and into open countryside — stone farm buildings, vaulted cellars, a medieval settlement that has sat on this ridge for five centuries.

What's inside those walls is the actual story. Rather than lean into the exposed-beam, wrought-iron register that most Tuscan conversions reach for, the group gave the interiors to Tristan Du Plessis of Studio A, a South African designer whose usual register is closer to a metropolitan hotel than an agriturismo — travertine floors, sculptural lighting from DCW éditions and Marset, a neutral countryside palette applied with fairly urban restraint, and a large-scale piece by the artist Kokekit set beneath the panoramic pool. The original stone walls and ceilings stay exposed throughout; everything placed inside them does not read as rustic. Whether that contrast lands as confident or simply out of place will depend on the guest — both readings hold.

The kitchen is Vincenzo Martella's, a Michelin-trained chef running Osso, a meat-focused Tuscan dining room, alongside a poolside bar, a main bar built on a New York register rather than a Tuscan one, and — arriving from Chapter Roma's own roster — a Mexican food truck serving tacos and empanadas until late. It's an odd combination on paper, cosmopolitan grafted onto contadino, and the property does not pretend otherwise. A 500-square-metre spa, F.A.R.M. Social, adds steam rooms, salt pools and a travertine-lined hydrotherapy circuit.

The eighty-two rooms are joined by The Mansion, a five-bedroom private villa with its own pool, olive grove and on-call chef, and the grounds run to horse riding, truffle hunting, olive-oil harvesting and padel — the working vocabulary of the countryside, offered as activity rather than backdrop. Rooms start around €400 a night, bed and breakfast.

— Camille