When a 21st-Century Family Moves Into a 12th-Century Castle

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/t-magazine/hollenegg-austria-liechtenstein-castle.html

Version 0 of 1.

AS A CHILD in Bologna, the curator Alice Stori Liechtenstein was enchanted by a scene in Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film, “The Leopard,” in which the young nobleman Tancredi is asked how many rooms are in his family’s castle. “No one knows, not even Uncle,” he responds. “He says a palace in which one knows every room isn’t worth living in.” Twenty years later, in the early aughts, she posed the same question to her future husband, Alfred Liechtenstein, when they first visited his ancestral home, Schloss Hollenegg, in the east Austrian hills. “I don’t think I’ve been in them all,” he replied, even though he had inherited the castle, which has been in his family for nearly two centuries, when he was 26. (There are 52 rooms total, for the record.)

Alfred, now 45, always knew Schloss Hollenegg was a magical place — like Disneyland, only real — with its Renaissance-style courtyard built by Abel von Hollenegg and renovated in 1550, its magnificent ballroom painted by Philipp Carl Laubmann in 1750 and its Baroque chapel open to local residents on Sundays. Portraits of his ancestors line the hallways, and a fresco of a family tree stretching back about 30 generations covers the library’s vaulted ceiling. For Alfred, who grew up near the palace, Hollenegg was inexorably linked to his family; not to care for it as an adult would have been an unthinkable breach of duty.

But his 39-year-old wife, as she says, “fought against this place for 11 years.” Before they relocated to the rural castle in 2014, her life was unquestionably metropolitan; after attending boarding school in England and university in Milan, she began creating exhibitions for the city’s annual Furniture Fair, eventually counting as clients the Milanese studio Atelier Biagetti, the online retailer Yoox and La Triennale di Milano. When she met Alfred, she was in graduate school in Barcelona, renting a one-bedroom apartment. “Living in a castle in the countryside was not the plan,” she says, so the couple compromised by moving to Graz, 50 minutes from Hollenegg, which has an international airport. At first, she thought the castle would be a weekend getaway, but trying to manage her career throughout Europe, three young children and two homes quickly became untenable; and so, after a decade or so in Graz, the castle became the family’s main residence.

Like many very large old houses — and especially the hundreds of privately owned, inhabitable castles in Austria — Schloss Hollenegg was in a state of neglect; it hadn’t been modernized since Alfred’s grandmother died in 1974. The couple had to install proper bathrooms (previously, there were old toilets hidden behind screens in the hallways) and build an internal staircase. (The only access to the third-floor bedrooms was through the outdoor arcades.) Today, the family inhabits less than half of the 21,500-square-foot property, and apart from the early 18th-century Chinese wallpaper and the 18th-century kachelofen (German wood-burning clay stoves), the private quarters are contemporarily quotidian: the kids’ rooms scattered with plastic toys; there’s a projector mounted in the living room for movie nights; and the simple kitchen crowded with stainless steel appliances is smallish by American standards. But many of the largely unused spaces, from the staterooms with their 17th-century silk-covered walls, to the sumptuous “green room” with its original coffered ceiling, lack heat or electricity, which helps preserve their finishes in near-perfect condition. Despite the fact that the castle hadn’t been fully occupied since 1991, when Alfred’s grandfather died, all of its rooms require constant upkeep, even the uninhabited ones: There is silver to be polished, plaster to be patched, floors to be waxed. A significant portion of the income Alfred derives from his family’s timber business — the grounds are thicketed with larches and spruces — goes toward property maintenance.

There is, after all, 900 years of history to maintain. The first records of the castle begin in 1163, but the structure is a palimpsest of a near-millennium of architectural trends: The worn limestone of the Renaissance-style stairway dates from 1577 and the bedrooms, with their Flemish tapestries and four-poster beds, from the late 18th century. The couple tried to restore the house with as many historically correct materials as they could — lime plaster to repair the delicate ceiling details, reclaimed wood to mend damaged parquet — but decided that any new additions would be unapologetically modern: their way of adding their names to the house’s lineage and writing themselves, and their era, onto its walls. Upon entering the residence, you’re struck with the first of these contributions, a trippy wallpapered and mirrored elevator by the German designer Markus Benesch, who covered the walls and floors with a disorienting pattern of Op Art Dalmatian spots. “It was a bit of shock the first time I saw it,” Alfred says.

DESPITE THESE NEVER-ENDING renovations, Alice never quite felt she possessed the castle; something about it always frustrated her attempts to make it as much hers as her husband’s. Then, in 2015 (around the time she reoriented her freelance business from exhibition design to personal curatorial projects), she decided that instead of the house merely being her dependent, it would become her partner. First, she conceived a showcase in Graz, inviting 23 designers whose work straddled art and design, including, among others, the Scottish designer Dean Brown and Peter Mabeo from Gaborone, Botswana, whose furniture fuses African craftsmanship with European influences. After being “surprised when nearly everyone said yes,” she says, Alice had a more ambitious idea: If Hollenegg was far from the world of contemporary design, why not bring that world to Hollenegg? In 2016, she asked Brown, along with the Viennese studio Mischer’Traxler, known for conceptual pieces that blend handicraft with technology, and the Italian duo Dossofiorito, whose work often includes plants, to be her first designers-in-residence. They each spent a few weeks living at the castle, collaborating with Alice to create a site-specific work that would remain in Hollenegg’s permanent collection, residing alongside the centuries-old furnishings. Brown installed a multidimensional étagère in a passageway overlooking one of the two courtyards to showcase various treasures collected over the years, such as an urn by Hilda Hellstrom and a collection of vases by Studio Furthermore. Dossofiorito created glass vases inspired by antique ceramics to hold bulbs, an homage to Alfred’s grandmother, Princess Ludmilla, who loved gardening.

Alice now chooses a few residents annually; with these designers, she is alternately nurturing and stern, encouraging them to draw on the history of the Schloss, to “explore all the rooms and open all the drawers,” but not to get so lost that they don’t finish their projects. Last fall, the Viennese design studio BreadedEscalope encountered in their wanderings the 19th-century diaries of Alfred’s ancestor Heinrich Liechtenstein, an adventurer who hunted buffalo with U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant and brought back redwood saplings from California, which now tower over the castle’s walls. Alice let them cut down one of the trees to carve into a table and pair of stools.

The residents’ pieces debut each May at a group show installed throughout Hollenegg, along with items from about 20 other visiting international designers whom Alice invites to present work. Last year’s exhibition was titled “Morphosis,” referencing gradual but important adaptations that often go unnoticed. The opening night drew guests from Europe and the Middle East who danced to music played by a D.J. from Ibiza, injecting youth and life into rooms that are normally shuttered and silent. Alice opened the castle to the public for the following month, attracting curious locals who had lived in Hollenegg’s shadow their whole lives yet had never seen its interiors. This year’s theme is “Legacy,” prompting designers to explore the personal and collective importance of heritage, which has captivated Alice since hosting Hollenegg’s first show, “Slow,” three years ago. Then as now, inspired by the pace of her more remote life, she wanted to re-examine the negative connotations that slowness has taken on in a culture that values the technological, the futuristic and the fast above all else. Indeed, now that Alice has embraced her countryside castle, she’s developed a broader sense of family and community, but also of time itself. “When you live in the city it’s all about me: my apartment, my job,” she says. “Now, I see life on a larger scale — it’s not about the next generation, but the next three generations. The trees Alfred plants today will be cut by our grandchildren.”