A Rare Glimpse Inside Elsa Peretti’s Sprawling Spanish Home

“The hidden people—close to the sea. In unspoiled nature as far away from houses as possible.

Her visitors, looking about, often thought how like the woman herself it all was: suspended between the modern age and unplaceable time past, the laptop and mobile phone and television anachronistic, and the fading tapestries and linens in their proper place.

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

It would be her home for the next seven years, until the Great Storm brought Charlie to her door. The cottage had been derelict in those days, and she’d had no money to restore it, not that she’d wanted to. She had only wanted the windmill. She’d moved right in. She only had a couple of bags, and nowhere else to go and she’d simply slotted herself