Dimora Ghirlandaio: 6 Houses for 1 House Party

Dimora Ghirlandaio sits six kilometres south of Florence, at Impruneta, and holds six separate houses around one restaurant, one pool and one sixteenth-century chapel. The most useful room in a house party is often the one in another building. Here a group can eat together every night and never share a staircase.

The six are Villa Ghirlandaio, La Fattoria, Il Frantoio, Lo Studio, La Bottega and the one-bedroom suite La Limonaia. You can book one of them or all of them, and those are entirely different transactions with entirely different expectations of privacy attached to them.

Reserve a house, or the whole guest estate

The whole-estate arrangement puts the six houses together with the restaurant, the park, the heated pool, the spa and the chapel. For a family across three generations, or a group marking something, that buys shared rooms belonging to one party and several front doors.

One disclosure is unusually direct, and the estate makes it itself rather than leaving it to be discovered. Dimora Ghirlandaio still has a resident artist, whose work hangs in the Uffizi’s Prints and Drawings collection. “The artist and his wife live in a private apartment inside the estate,” the page says. “They do not have access to any of the villas, restaurant, SPA, swimming pool or event venues.”

For most hosts this changes nothing.

For the rare brief that requires nobody else living anywhere on the land, raise it before the deposit is paid, because it is far easier to discuss in September than on the afternoon the marquee goes up.

The main villa has five bedrooms, but not five identical positions

Villa Ghirlandaio has five bedrooms on three levels. One sits on the ground floor beside the dining room, the fireplace and the kitchen. Three are on the floor above, each with a bathroom in a different coloured marble. The fifth is the old dovecote, above the southern pitch of the roof, which the estate calls the villa’s most exclusive room. Its own page lists all five as king size and then describes three of them as doubles, so confirm the beds.

The dovecote will be asked for first. It sits higher than anything else and sees further. The ground-floor room is the kinder allocation for anyone who would rather not climb, though a ground floor in a house from the 1400s does not automatically mean step-free, so ask about the route from the car.

Assign the rooms yourself before anybody sees the photographs.

In a house standing since the fifteenth century, charm and convenience rarely share a floor.

Three accommodation choices explain the wider estate

La Fattoria has a kitchen with an island, a bright sitting room and a gravel terrace from which you can pick out Brunelleschi’s dome. Treat it as a house within the party rather than an overflow wing. That single room matters when somebody is counting bedrooms across three estates on a spreadsheet.

La Limonaia is a one-bedroom suite over the Renaissance garden, with its own small sitting room. It is not a miniature villa. It is the right answer for one couple who want to withdraw without taking a whole house out of the allocation.

One thing the estate does not publish anywhere is a maximum-guest figure, for any house or for the property as a whole. So build the party from a room-by-room proposal instead of a headline total: who sleeps where, which bathrooms are shared, how the beds can be made up, and whether every household has a room of its own to sit in.

Dinner can happen together without taking over someone’s kitchen

The restaurant stands where the barn was and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. Seasonal produce from local growers, vegetables and herbs from the estate garden, and its own extra virgin olive oil. A private chef will also cook in your villa or under your pergola.

Two formats, and they do different jobs. A restaurant dinner makes everybody leave their own house in order to meet, which is the whole point on the second and third nights. A villa dinner suits the first, when half the party is still landing at Peretola and nobody wants to be anywhere at eight sharp.

Ask for one meal plan rather than a stack of unrelated catering quotes. Put the big dinner in the middle and make the days either side easy. Get the chef, the drinks, the service hours and the clearing up written down, because an offer of private dining is not the same as meals being included.

The restaurant is reserved for the estate’s own guests and closed to outsiders. That is not the same as having it to yourself: only the whole-estate booking empties the other tables.

The garden and chapel give the stay a setting

The chapel is the estate’s best argument. Built in the sixteenth century and dedicated to the Visitation, it holds frescoes by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio showing the Madonna and Child alongside family portraits, painted in tribute to his father Domenico, the painter the house is named for. The property records go back to 1433; the Ghirlandaio family held it from about 1482 to 1562. The spa sits in the vaulted cellars below the villa, with sauna, Turkish bath, jacuzzi and chromotherapy showers.

Neither is an unrestricted event space. A host planning a ceremony in that chapel should settle permitted use, numbers and any separate arrangement well in advance, and should have spa access itemised separately from individual treatments in the quotation rather than assuming the two arrive together.

One number needs care, because the estate publishes it two ways. The pool page and the Villa Ghirlandaio page both give the heated swimming pool as 150 square metres. The whole-estate page calls it “a 150-meter heated swimming pool”, which would be a very long swim indeed. Read it as 150 square metres. Two orange trees grow from stone islets in the middle of it, which is charming and slightly reduces the length available for lengths.

Keep Florence as an option, not a daily obligation

The address is Via Colleramole 59, Impruneta: six kilometres south of Florence, about twenty minutes by car from Santa Maria Novella. Close enough to be useful, far enough to be the countryside. No rate or minimum stay is published.

Take one full day in Florence and leave the next one here.

Six houses only earn their money when the party has time to be inside them, and a week of breakfast-to-dinner itineraries turns 150 square metres of heated pool and a Ghirlandaio chapel into a very expensive place to leave a suitcase.

The invitation here is domestic. Gather the people, give each household somewhere to retreat to, then bring everyone back to one table at eight.

The luxury is not having to choose between the two.

The Luxury.it perspective

The single most useful line on this website is the one about the artist. Most estates would leave a resident household to be discovered on the third morning, when somebody walks past a window with a coffee. Dimora Ghirlandaio writes it down, names what the residents cannot use, and lets the host decide. We would like to see that copied.

The bedroom arithmetic deserves the same scepticism you would apply anywhere. La Fattoria advertises four bedrooms and sleeps three couples. Il Frantoio counts four and has a fifth in a separate building. Add the headline numbers across six houses and you will invite more people than the estate can comfortably hold.

Our booking, for twelve: Villa Ghirlandaio and La Fattoria, with La Limonaia for whichever couple most needs a door. Then the whole-estate agreement, so the restaurant belongs to you at eight o’clock.

Related guides

Our Tuscany private-estate guide sets Dimora Ghirlandaio beside the other houses near Florence.