T he late Italian jewelry designer Elsa Peretti used to like to say, “Aesthetics kills me,” but what could she have meant by that? One way to make sense of it is to walk around the places she lived most of her adult life: Sant Martí Vell, the abandoned Catalan village she bought and resurrected, house by house, and where she died in her sleep on March 18, 2021; and her small apartment at 4 Carrer del Bruc in Barcelona.
Both residences are simple, each in its own way. Nothing about either of them cries out for attention. Many of the objects inside are plain and workaday. The accommodations are spartan. But each dwelling reflects a restless quest for perfection—of mood, of objects, of placement, of proportion, of color—that could, if not achieved, ruin Peretti’s peace of mind. “If the space was wrong, if there was something she didn’t like, she just couldn’t be. She was thinking about that wrong ashtray and not listening to you,” says Stefano Palumbo, who runs the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation and worked alongside Peretti for more than 20 years.
Women still adore Peretti for the jewelry she designed for Tiffany & Co. for 50 years: the Bone Cuff, the silver Bean, the Open Heart Pendant, the gold Mesh Bra and the Diamonds by the Yard series, to name just a few of Peretti’s greatest hits through more than 30 collections. In their sculptural purity, these pieces stand as proof against trendiness. Jewelry is not fashion, Peretti used to say. At the same time, she made her pieces effortless to wear and inviting to touch. Peretti’s woman is never meant to serve as a large pedestal for a small sculpture.
But her homes are works of art, too. “She was creating her own still life in every corner of every house,” says Palumbo. He points to one such vignette in the Barcelona apartment: four ordinary-looking Staffordshire dogs on a dresser, several crystal candlesticks between them and two yellow Chinese vases behind. Hanging overhead is a large gray fish painted by the Catalan artist Joan Gardy Artigas. “The dogs are kitsch—bad taste could be fantastic to her—but the composition of them here is just so elegant!” And so it is.
Peretti bought the apartment on Carrer del Bruc in the late 1980s and spent much of the last 40 years of her life here. This is where Peretti met the wider world, cigarette in hand, while Sant Martí Vell offered more of a refuge from it. The Barcelona kitchen table is where she conducted business, meeting with Tiffany executives or the skilled artisans who realized her jewelry designs or the journalists and photographers who came through (she got very famous early on) or the Catalan artists whose work she collected and promoted.
It’s hard to get away from one of them. Works by the Catalan painter Robert Llimós—large somber canvases of goats, mostly—are everywhere. (Peretti ended up owning 85 Llimós pieces.) But there are other artists, too. On entering the Bruc apartment, you run into the large black head of a bull in iron and bronze by the Catalan sculptor Xavier Medina-Campeny. Peretti, not surprisingly, had a thing for bullfighting, and besides, she was a Taurus. Her collection of 20th-century Catalan art is an important one.
Peretti had the collecting bug, bad. She was also, paradoxically, a homebody who traveled widely. The pair of exquisite Qing Dynasty chairs and the marble-inlaid hongmu daybed in Carrer del Bruc are just two of the exquisite Chinese pieces she brought back.
In both her Spanish homes, Peretti took great pains to respect the local idiom and work within it. The Barcelona apartment is a typical middle class building of the 1920s in a solidly middle class neighborhood, so that was the visual code Peretti adopted for it. We are in a familiar corner of Gaudí’s universe. She bought most of her furniture in local second-hand markets like Els Encants in Barcelona. She didn’t touch the typical stained-glass windows with floral engravings, the decorative plaster moldings or the omnipresent mosaic tiles. “Everybody in Barcelona had these tiles, and they changed them into God knows what!” says Palumbo. “She protected these tiles and wanted to conserve the whole atmosphere of the bourgeoisie of that period.”
In Sant Martí Vell, Peretti worked within the tradition of the Catalan countryside and its rustic artisans: coiled rope, wood, wicker, stone. But by the time she finished adding her own accents—a bullwhip here (she loved whips), a Chinese lacquer piece there, an animal skeleton (she also loved skeletons), an African mask—she had created something extraordinary. The American poet Mark Strand once said about the great Pablo Neruda’s poetic technique: “Mundane items, modified by adjectives denoting the rare or celestial, are elevated to a realm of exceptional value.” That’s Peretti to a T.
“She was creating her own still life in every corner of every house.”
The mundane is elevated to truly celestial effect in the double-height great room at Sant Martí Vell. A massive cast-iron hearth, by the Italian architect Lanfranco Bombelli, rises two floors to the ceiling. A gigantic stone mill wheel serves as the dining table. (It is amusing to imagine the scene Palumbo describes of Peretti and her close friend Liza Minnelli trying to maneuver the mill wheel into just the right position; it must weigh several tons.) Peretti herself designed the chunky, rough-hewn bronze chairs and stools with the celebrated Catalan sculptor Xavier Corberó, who was a frequent collaborator and also one of her lovers. The room is really something.
T hese houses were never meant as showplaces. They were the intimate art Peretti made for herself and her friends. Last October, a few dozen influencers and journalists were given the rare chance to wander through them. The invitation came from Tiffany and the Peretti Foundation as part of a celebration to mark the 50-year anniversary of their remarkably profitable partnership. (For many years, Peretti’s designs represented 10% of Tiffany’s total worldwide sales.)
It’s safe to say the open house would never have happened if Peretti were still alive. One can imagine how she would have reacted to the crowd of young women swarming through the narrow rooms of Sant Martí Vell: Loudly and negatively. This is exactly what Peretti retreated to Sant Martí Vell to get away from.
“The village is becoming a nightmare! People come and peep through windows. Maybe I should open a pizzeria!” she railed to an interviewer 10 years ago.
Yet, in her younger days, the limelight was what she sought out and where she flourished. Many people who may know her for nothing else can call to mind Helmut Newton’s striking 1975 photo of Peretti in a Playboy-style bunny outfit designed by Halston, long black gloves and a bunny mask, head thrown back, bare shoulders jutting, her long body leaning backwards over a balcony railing against the New York City skyline. (The get-up was Peretti’s idea, and the bunny mask now sits proudly in Sant Martí Vell.)
To reach that high-rise balcony, Peretti had to turn her back on her rich, conservative family in Rome at the age of 21. Her strict, demanding father warned her that he would cut her off if she walked out the door. She did and he did, and their rift endured until shortly before he died.
She taught skiing. She taught French. She got a degree in interior design. Finally, she landed in Barcelona, where she turned to modeling to pay the rent. That worked out better. More importantly, she found a new home among Barcelona’s anti-Franco artists and intellectuals. They called themselves la gauche divine, and they congregated at a local disco called Bocaccio, where Peretti met Salvador Dalí, Corberó, the photographer Colita and other Catalan luminaries who would become friends, lovers and collaborators down the road. But she found her deepest attachment and an inexhaustible wellspring of creativity in Catalunya itself.
Peretti’s growing success as a model drove her to New York in 1968. She did even better there, but she never cared for the catwalk; in fact, it frightened her. She found her fulfillment elsewhere. In 1969, Peretti took a small bud vase she had found in a flea market and had a Spanish silversmith fashion a two-inch prototype to be worn as a pendant. Peretti’s bud vase necklace made its first appearance around the neck of a model in designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s fashion show that year. The response was immediate and stupendous. The bud vase was fresh, delightful and, not incidentally, affordable—hallmarks of so much of Peretti’s subsequent output.
After that, things happened in a proverbial New York minute. Early on in the city, she had met Roy Halston Frowick—the fashion designer who would soon be known simply as Halston—when he was still making hats for Bergdorf Goodman. Their stars rose in tandem: She designed jewelry for him, learned about style from him, took drugs and partied at Studio 54 with him and fought extravagantly with him. It was a love affair in every way but one and it ended in the Italian manner, with Peretti tossing a sable coat Halston had given her into a roaring fire.
It was Halston who took Peretti to see Walter Hoving, chief executive at Tiffany, who wasted no time signing her to an exclusive contract in 1974. That contract instantly made her rich and famous. Just as important to her, it showed Ferdinando Peretti, her implacable father, that she could make it big without him. They reconciled not long before he died in 1977. She inherited roughly half his immense wealth and took his nickname, Nando, for the charitable foundation that owns the rights to her work, adding her own name to his some years later. (She heeded Halston’s warning never to sell control of her name, as he had, to his bitter regret.)
B ack in 1968, a friend had showed Peretti a photograph of two small stone houses in the hamlet of Sant Martí Vell, about an hour’s drive north of Barcelona. She bought them for a few thousand dollars, which was all she could afford at the time. As she made more money, she bought more houses. She ended up owning 18 of them, connected by tunnels and terraces into a stone labyrinth.
By the end of the 1970s, Peretti had soured on her hard-living New York life. It was no good for her work, and it was worse for her health. Catalunya was better for both. In Sant Martí Vell, she moved from house to house in a cloud of cigarette smoke, barefoot and dressed in her caftans, endlessly refining the space around her. She cherished and respected the local artisans who worked with her, but she drove them hard. Working with her was no picnic. “You had to demonstrate your skill every morning to keep her trust,” says Palumbo. “You could disappear in a flash. The few who survived did a really great job.”
It was not a life built for comfort. For that, she had two luxurious properties in Italy—an apartment in Rome and a villa in Porto Ercole, both designed in high style by her friend Renzo Mongiardino. She went there to play the hometown girl who made good, and she took great pride in that.
Catalunya was something else altogether. For all their exquisiteness, the houses were not made for easy living. In Sant Martí Vell, Peretti would spend a few months in one house, then a few months in another. She embraced their austerity, always seeking out the most cramped quarters to sleep in. “She spent the most time in the most uncomfortable little house—she loved to be uncomfortable,” says Palumbo. “Only somebody very sensitive can understand that.”
