Arniano: See Inside The Guinness Family's Tuscan Farmhouse - The Gloss Magazine

Arniano: See Inside The Guinness Family’s Tuscan Farmhouse

Not far from Siena is Arniano, an 18th-century farmhouse, the childhood home of author and home cook Amber Guinness. It’s also the idyllic setting for a painting school which marries Guinness’ love of food and art, celebrated in her new book…

When I was at Edinburgh university, I always liked to cook; it never occurred to me that there was any other way to feed myself. And, as only the young can be, I was deeply and earnestly disapproving of the takeaways and the deepbottomed pizzas that would appear at the door when they were ordered. So, I made the food my mother [interior designer Camilla Guinness] had taught me: chicken with grapes, beef stew, pasta alla Adam, malfatti, my dad’s scrambled eggs on toast, and desserts from The River Café. This brought me so much comfort. I was aware of the gift that my mother had given me. What was then an interest developed into a passion, which provided me with comfort and distraction [after her father Jasper’s death]. I was manic with grief, studying obsessively, despite being without my main academic support system – my father. It was a way of coping, and of living in denial of what I was really feeling. Having something to do in the hours when I wasn’t in the library, something that kept both my mind and my hands fully occupied, was a godsend. As I tried to recreate the food and hospitality of my parents in a kitchen on Leith Walk, I felt closer to home and to Dada.

Above: Amber shelling bacelli – the Tuscan term for pods of legumes – which she uses for aperitivi such as crostini mixed with mint and ricotta or served with pecorino cheese, or as a main dish with tagliatelle. Main photo: The terrace at Arniano, which the Guinness family bought in 1989, where Amber spent the first 13 years of her life. The daybeds were designed by Camilla Guinness.

Friends and food provided solace. When [her sister] Claudia and I started coming back home to Italy, it was with big groups of friends, and there was comfort in trying to recreate the magic that we had learned by osmosis, by watching our parents host the wonderful cast of characters with whom we grew up. After I graduated, I moved to London and started working, trying to find a path in the new reality; I took a job as an assistant in Bryan Ferry’s London studio, a wonderful place to work, which afforded much excitement and travel. But really, I was grieving and lost, and soon what gave me solace and made me feel closer to Dada was being at home in Italy. Two-and-a-half years after his death, I knew there was nothing for it, I would have to find a way to process the trauma of losing my father. I quit my job and enrolled in art classes. I supported myself through a mixture of waitressing, working as a cooking assistant on photo shoots and cooking for private dinners. Not surprisingly, being an artist and part-time cook doesn’t afford one much financial stability, and I was still unable to spend any length of time in Italy.

Above/below: Lunches at Arniano are informal feasts laid out so that everyone can help themselves. There will be a central dish – a pasta, a tart or a frittata – accompanied by one or two salads, a plate of prosciutto, salami and vegetables.

I think it was because the only things that seemed to make me feel better were cooking and hosting that I came up with the idea of trying to make a living from them. That would also allow me to spend at least part of the year at home. And so, one day in 2014, in a pub in West London, my painter friend William Roper-Curzon and I came up with the idea of the painting course. We were both looking to spend time in Italy, and to support ourselves while we were there. It seemed the perfect solution – we would run painting weeks at Arniano. William would teach, and I would cook. It would be a chance to spend time at home and to emulate the houseparty atmosphere my parents had created, as well as to share the beauty of our family home with others. Despite a few hiccups along the way – not least the time when William lost his passport before he was due to fly over from England, leaving me with a group of rather peeved (though well-fed) painters, and no teacher – we have now been running the courses for six years. In that time, we have had some amazing experiences and forged many lifelong friendships with our guests, some of whom return year after year. A few months before our disastrous second art course, when we had no teacher, I met my husband Matthew, a journalist, who has thankfully taken over all the bits of running the courses that William and I don’t enjoy and are not well suited to – the logistics. He has become a perfect third to what was a hosting duo.

Below: The kitchen at Arniano adjoins the dining room. My parents put in a fireplace at waist height, for cooking on, and my dad would often grill meat or roast chestnuts on the fire. The ceilings in the kitchen are high, and light pours in through two small, rectangular windows located high up on either side of the fireplace.

I don’t question that it was a combination of art and cooking that helped me, if not recover from, at least get past, losing my father. Having saved up some money from the first batch of painting courses, I enrolled in a foundation course at City & Guilds, a London art school; here I fell in love with etching and made prints from memory of the views from Arniano. Dreamlike in quality, and not exactly realistic, they portrayed the very real yearning I felt to be home. Anyone who knows this house well, when they see these etchings, points and says, ‘But that’s Monte Amiata.’ While I was enrolled full-time at art school, I went back to a mixture of evening jobs: cooking for private dinners in London, waitressing and occasionally flying out to Italy to cook for villa rentals.

Below: Amber in the kitchen making malfatti.

I was not, and am not, a formally trained chef, but I have in one way, or another been cooking all my life. Cooking is one of those practices (like painting or drawing) where you get exponentially better the more you do it, and since beginning to cook in earnest in 2014, I have learned a huge amount. The more you practise, the greater the return. Undoubtedly, my life would have been easier at times if I had gone to chef ’s school, as there are many things that the selftaught cook needs to confront and figure out for themselves with no help – but I loved my time in Edinburgh studying for my degree, as well as the journey that led me to discover what it was I actually wanted to do. Curiosity, enthusiasm and determination have taken me quite some way, despite my lack of formal training. To this day, I use many of the tips and skills that I observed while waitressing at The River Cafe and learned to do while working my handful of shifts in their kitchen. I am a deft hand at prepping an artichoke, having prepared more of these vegetables for service than I could possibly remember, and I can still retrieve the ink sac from a squid without rupturing it – skills for which I am most grateful. But, on the whole, I am a home cook who makes simple, accessible and tasty meals.

Below: Jasper Guinness’ Panama hat sits under a picture by Phylpa Golden.

In June of the same year as my stint at The River Cafe, Matthew and I were married in Florence, two years and two days after we met. And five years and a month since we had lost Dada, my sister stood in front of all our friends and family, in her maid-of-honour’s speech describing the first Christmas we had all spent together at Matthew’s cottage in Wiltshire the year before – how natural it had felt to all be together, and how our family suddenly seemed to be the right number again. Having spent so much time in Florence planning our wedding, and having a handful of great friends there, Matthew and I decided to embark on a new adventure. He had just left a magazine job to go freelance, and I had finished my course at City & Guilds, so we decided to move for the foreseeable future to Florence. I resigned from my various jobs, and we packed up a car and drove from London to Tuscany, where we have been ever since, spending the majority of our time in Florence, and decamping to Arniano for weekends – to see my mum, or for painting courses.

Below: The upstairs sitting room is the first room we originally lived in during the “camping stage” of the renovations. It used to have a huge, deep agricultural fireplace which took up half the room. My parents took it out 15 years ago and replaced it with this simple, elegant fireplace and two niches for lights.

More than anything else, what has taken me the furthest as a self-taught cook is a love of food and eating, and sharing this with people. I have come to realise that I am more suited to life as a cook for smaller numbers, rather than working as a chef in a restaurant, because I like to connect with and share in the enjoyment of the people I am feeding. If I am cooking for the painting course, this means I sit with them, chat, and partake in the meal, laughing and spilling glasses of wine. At other times, when I am cooking for private clients or villa rentals, this satisfaction comes from hearing laughter and appreciation from the dining table as I stand preparing the dessert in the kitchen. In 2019, I turned 30, as did the chapter of Arniano with these Guinnesses at its helm. The stories are endless, the guests innumerable, the house parties legendary, and the sense of home paramount. But always at its heart are Jasper and Camilla, their warmth and hospitality emulated as well as we can, through Claudia and me and our endeavours.

This is an edited extract from A House Party in Tuscany by Amber Guinness, published by Thames & Hudson. Photography by Robyn Lea with Saghar Setareh.

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