At home with Elsa Peretti, in essence

An immortal parallel exists between a tiny 17th-century village in Catalonia and a young Italian model arriving in Manhattan in 1968. The same year Elsa Peretti lit the fuse on a glittering career as a model and creative in the throes of the decadent 1970s, she also embarked on the project of a lifetime: restoring a tumbledown gathering of buildings in Sant Martí Vell, one of the first of which she bought shortly after for US$8,000. “There are many Elsa Perettis and Sant Martí Vell encompasses them all,” says Stefano Palumbo, director of the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which safeguards her legacy and furthers her many philanthropic pursuits.

The Elsa most know best was one of Tiffany & Co.’s most prolific and influential designers. She joined the jeweller in 1974 and her first designs sold out in a day. This year, Tiffany marks 50 years of the wildly successful partnership by releasing three new pieces including two ring versions of her celebrated bone cuff. Each are evolutions of her starkly minimal, organic forms that shocked the jewellery world in their opposition to elaborate, ostentatious designs. Away from the clamour of her starry New York city trajectory, where she became part of the scene populated by Andy Warhol, designer Halston and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, she returned as often as she could to Sant Martí Vell. Supervising its restoration, she would work in the tiny Plaça del Poble outside her first completed building Casa Pequeña, in featherweight Halston caftans, conversing with locals. The place gave her respite and creative fuel. “I go to Spain to think. I come to New York to act,” she said in a 1974 interview. Spain was her paradoxical life, pursuing what were her most significant creative influences. “All the Catalan aesthetics fell upon her with a force that would mark her forever,” Palumbo describes.

Though she travelled the world, leaving her wealthy, conservative family home in Rome to model, it was in Barcelona, where she modelled for Salvador Dalí in 1966, that she felt cosmically, definitively aligned. Spain became the backbone of her inner life and she was willing to pay the price for it: being financially cut off from a family who didn’t understand her choices. It was here she worked with silver artisans, producing first the open bottle inspired by an antique bud vase then her bone cuff. Although it draws on the bones in the ossuary of the 17th-century Capuchin church she would visit as a child in Rome (and occasionally slip into her purse when her nanny wasn’t looking), the cuff was moulded in the shadow of Gaudi’s curvilinear forms in Barcelona that so enthralled her. A prototype of that first cuff is perched on a modest wooden shelf in one of her bedrooms.

It was also here, under an ivy-embellished stone tower, that she hosted this magazine in 1995 for one of her rare interviews. The Vogue crew, including photographer Martyn Thompson and then editor Nancy Pilcher, shared meals in the hidden grottos and on stone tables that had, discretely, hosted the likes of Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra, architect Ricardo Bofill and illustrator Joe Eula who would enjoy flamenco performances by candlelight. The resulting article takes pride of place framed on a wall and serves as a reminder that Peretti kept the flame of her social life alive outside New York.

Those who came into her orbit here remember music, candles and smoke as the pillars of her presence. She is also remembered as uncompromising, but equally giving, sensing when something was wrong, asking after someone, their family, and from time to time, looking after bills, though she would rarely advertise things like this—Palumbo tells of his instructions from her to be discreet with the impacts of her foundation that supported young women, animals and those living with a disability.

Standing there today, a warm, dry wind carries the sound of birdsong through flung-open windows. A group of women rest their horses in the shade on a dirt road. A huddle of buildings form a ring around a central chapel. In these sedate surrounds, the code to Peretti’s epic impact and legacy can be cracked. The marble hands in the middle of a grand dining table are the hands of her mother, Maria Luisa Pighini, a painter and poet, and speak to her innate creativity. A fireplace by Lanfranco Bombelli, an artist and architect, in imposing black metal pierces a landing hovering next to a flight of stairs of the Sala Grande, and chairs by Xavier Corberó, tell of her collaborative spirit.

She revered other creatives and craftspeople, her albaliñes, with whom she had long-lasting relationships, continually promoting internationaland Catalan creatives–from humble bricklayers to Japanese artisans and master painters.The honesty of the materials–stone, wood, natural materials that commune with nature–tell of her sensibility. Rejecting notions of preciousness, she embraced materials she saw had soul: glass for candlesticks, Kyoto silk, leather for her belts inspired by horse’s girths, a rattlesnake’s tail inspired her snake necklace, a lima bean, her famous bean design. A millstone, used to crush olives, is the aforementioned grand table. She loved nature’s forms and sought to form an impression of them in her designs, which elicit something primal in their essentialism, in their connection to the living world.

“This is a grace that she received,” says Palumbo of these instincts. “I think it’s something spiritual.”Perhaps the most impactful part of her legacy, though, is in her generosity of her design. “While she creates a piece of jewellery, Elsa thinks about the weight it will have, the wearability, the practicality of closing a clasp, the absence of elements that could hurt, the touch,” says Pelumbo of her sensitivity to the wearer. Every surface is smoothed, in dialogue with the body, often by hand in the Barcelona workshop today. “Making it purchasable by a working woman without the need to have a man give it to her…much more than a piece of jewellery, it is a manifesto of 20th century feminism.”

The way she ennobled silver, bringing it back into the Tiffany vocabulary, is similar to the way she places a Picasso, a Warhol, Duchamp or De Chirico in her home, next to anIndonesian timber ancestor-image statue, or beach shell, devoid of obvious hierarchy. Of all her thousands of creations, Sant Martí Vell is the most authentic expression of Elsa Peretti as much as it is an exercise in elegance and humility. Eight years before her passing, Peretti received a prize from the National Council of Culture and Arts for contributions to Catalan culture. She was the first non-Catalan to win it. Touched, she made a rare public appearance dressed impeccably in sweeping blue silk Bill Dugan. Americans, too, adopted her, many not realising she was Italian, a fact she also cherished. Though she preferred the chickens and dogs to dance floors and boardrooms, Peretti didn’t retreat here from the world asa recluse. She stayed connected, touching it from afar through the work. She once said: “Until success is part of your life, you don’t imagine it. And to be recognised by people was very good for my confidence. But as soon as you take your image too seriously, you are making a terrible mistake. My image has nothing to do with me. The work does.”

Elsa’s final resting place is in the town’s chapel, at the heart of the village and one of the quietest sanctuaries within a sanctuary she conjured with devotion and vigour. The walls are a serene mix of chalk and lapis lazuli, a hue typical of the area, representing water and the sky. Cocooned within blau de Montserrat; is how she will forever be–at the centre of a world she realised for herself, in astounding form.