From the Archives: Escape to Formentera With Consuelo Castiglioni

“Everything Goes” by Hamish Bowles, was originally published in the January 2004 issue of Vogue.

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Consuelo Castiglioni uses the apt phrase hippie chic to describe the aesthetic of Marni, the fashion house that she established with her husband, Gianni, barely a decade ago and rapidly built into a must-have label for bohemian fashionistas.

For Marni's summer collections, Consuelo brought her idiosyncratic sensibility to looks that mixed ethnic and vintage elements with intriguing cutting. And Marni's prints, with the quaint charm of twenties wallpaper designs—or, this season, fifties-homemaker china patterns—have become instant collectibles. Marni, under the Castiglionis' direction, has also subverted and modernized the idea of what a fur could be—an accessibly priced high-fashion item, a whimsically colored accessory—illustrating their family connection to the illustrious business Gianni's grandmother founded in the forties, which still produces many of the furs for fashion houses from Fendi to Prada.

But for the Castiglionis, hippie chic extends far beyond their Milanese fashion life. The Swiss-born Consuelo, a wan, fragile beauty, met the dashing Gianni when they were both students summering at Forte dei Marmi, the old-fashioned Tuscan beach resort, and ever since the world of adventuresome travel, sun, sea, and sand has bound their lives together. Summer holidays spent exploring the wilds of Corsica in their 50-foot Hatteras fishing boat left them with a taste for unmanicured island life, which, in the summer of 1996, led them to Formentera. "The first time that we arrived," remembers Consuelo, "the port was so tiny, with its three palm trees, that I said, 'Now we are in Africa!'" The couple fell in love with this windswept arc of land that lies in the Mediterranean off the eastern coast of Spain.

The Castiglionis soon discovered that it was one thing to yearn for a house here and quite another to make it a reality. The Formenterans are a feisty island people who over the millennia have seen off marauding hordes of Romans, Phoenicians, and Moors only to be invaded now by jet-set adventurers, superannuated hippies, teenage ravers, and German naturists. Intense pride in their home has resulted in both protective zoning codes and an inbred reluctance to sell. Gianni spent months bicycling around the island—thirteen miles long, with hilly extremities linked by a narrow spit of land with a great sweep of beach to one side and sheltered rocky coves on the other—making endless blind house calls to see if anyone would relent. Eventually, he persuaded a local farmer to surrender a field. Like all the cultivated land on the island, the property is hemmed with low orange stone-and-adobe walls, and dotted with venerable fig trees, spreading so wide that their branches are propped up with spindly groves of twigs. The site also provides unbroken views to Es Vedrà, the white mountain rock on the southern tip of Ibiza, the island's glamorous neighbor.

Presented with the luxury of being able to create the house they wanted, the Castiglionis eschewed the local vernacular of dark fincas with tiny shuttered windows, houses that are turned in on themselves against the island's fierce winds, the unforgiving heat of the summers, and the bleakness of the winter months. Instead, they wanted a place that embraced these elements, where indoor and outdoor spaces would connect fluidly. “Gianni wanted something really open—to be able to see through the house,” says Consuelo, “and in the summer I want to have lots of light coming in.” She laughs, adding, “We wanted a kind of Flintstones thing!”

A chief inspiration came from a trip to Yemen, where she was awed by the adobe high-rise cities that emerge from the desert like spectral Art Deco Gothams. The effect led to the design of the house's vertiginous staircase. With its shallow steps and dramatic lack of a banister, this is clearly not to be attempted after a merry evening imbibing Hierbas, the toxic local liqueur. In the main living room, walls of French windows are left open in the summer months, so that upon arrival you see the terraces and the pool beyond. Deep loggias on all sides, shaded with palm-frond roofs, like Robinson Crusoe's cabin, are furnished to provide further living space in the balmy summers. Shocking-pink bougainvillea and electric-blue morning glory twine up columns, providing a brilliant shot of color, while Javanese four-poster beds and rattan sun loungers are piled high with downy mattresses and cushions in Marni prints. Other textiles in the house were found in India, Egypt, and Kuwait, where Consuelo bought a Bedouin tent, soon to be installed among the fig, persimmon, and pomegranate trees—and the darting lizards—in the gardens.

The builders were initially nonplussed by a brief that demanded techniques that would suggest an imperfect human touch. On an early site visit, Consuelo was appalled to discover that the loggia's columns “were perfect” and that the vast, pale roof terraces had all been paved in shiny new bathroom tiles in the practical local vernacular. “In the beginning they really didn't like our ideas at all—that we wanted things to be deliberately mal hecho' [poorly made], as they called it. Then I think they thought the effect was rather nice, and finally they started bringing their other clients to see it.”

The furnishings reflect the family's world travels, from which they invariably return laden with inspirations. “I love to shop!” laughs Consuelo, who found the geometric-patterned wool carpets piled in the sitting room, for instance, in the remote Moroccan villages of Zagora and Merzouga; those on the terraces were brought back from Turkey, and the brightly colored straw mats in the kitchen and bathrooms from Zanzibar. The new French doors that were, frankly, too brand spanking were limed to age them, while ancient Moroccan ones studded with enormous nail heads were used indoors. The passion obviously runs in the family; daughter Carolina, 22, studying the business side of fashion, brought a wooden kayak back from Bali, and son Giovanni, seventeen, whiles away lazy summer afternoons playing Bantumi, a backgammon-like game with seed-pod counters, which he discovered on Zanzibar. For Consuelo, there's no better way to spend a summer day than trawling the local hippie markets for handmade jewelry and accessories in hopes that she'll discover one more treasure. “I always find something that becomes a starting point for an idea,” she says with her wry smile, always dreaming of Marni.