What makes Geneva’s Barilla mansion worth US$73 million?
An heir to the Barilla pasta fortune talks about the extensive renovations that were done to the impeccable 1830 home, bringing in state-of-the-art technology and design
After selling their shares in Barilla S.p.A., the pasta company, Riccardo Barilla’s parents moved in 1975 from Italy to Switzerland. They bought a house on about 10 acres of land in Vandœuvres, a wealthy suburb of Geneva, and stayed in it for the next 40 years.
In 2013, after his parents’ deaths, Barilla inherited a property that was virtually unchanged from when they’d bought it.
“There wasn’t electricity everywhere in the house, the heating was like a dinosaur, and the roof wasn’t insulated,” he said. “When we opened up the roof, we found birds and insects having a party up there—it was the shell, and that’s it.”
Barilla, who lives in Geneva and worked in the financial industry, decided that he and his wife would renovate the house and move in with their two children. After successfully petitioning to have the property rezoned as three lots (they entertained the possibility of keeping the original house and developing another two), they set about gutting his family home.
Soon after renovating the property, which has at least nine bedrooms and 22,000 square feet of living space, Barilla came to the sad conclusion that his children were, in fact, never going to live at home again.
“We got the house in 2013, and it was a four-year project,” he said. “And when I began it, I wasn’t thoughtful enough, because my wife and I didn’t realise that our kids would grow up.”
“All of a sudden, we saw that we’d be staying here with two dogs and a cat by ourselves in a huge house,” he continued. “And we realised that we wouldn’t mind just going back to Italy.” The couple has now placed the property on the market for 70 million Swiss francs, or about $73 million, listing it with Alexander Kraft, the chairman of Sotheby’s International Realty France.