Engel & Völkers offers the House of Gucci villa in the Aosta Valley

A house that has been in a film is usually sold on the strength of the part. Villa Laubenò, which Engel & Völkers is offering through its Private Office for €2.9 m, is better read the other way round: an early twentieth-century mountain house with eleven bedrooms that happened to be cast as the winter retreat of the Gucci family.

The house in the film

House of Gucci is an American family drama by Ridley Scott. Lady Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, who had her former husband Maurizio Gucci, then head of the house that carries his name and played by Adam Driver, murdered; Al Pacino completes the leading cast. The film was shot at locations across Italy, among them Florence, Milan, Rome and Lake Como. The winter belongs to Villa Laubenò in the Aosta Valley, which stood in for the family's retreat in the mountains.

The residence is spectacular: thanks to its particular atmosphere, the property was the ideal backdrop for the iconic ski scenes in the film.

Michele Taverna, property adviser, Engel & Völkers Valle d'Aosta

What is actually for sale

Strip away the cast list and the particulars stand on their own. The villa is detached, dates from the early twentieth century and sits in the heart of Gressoney-Saint-Jean. It has three salons, eleven bedrooms and eight bathrooms, and separate quarters for staff, a statement about how a mountain house of this age was meant to be lived in.

The three reception rooms are the core of it. Taverna describes them as generous, representative spaces of the kind that is classic for the large alpine holiday houses of the period: rooms for receiving guests, for long evenings, for a family that arrives in numbers.

Room for more than one household

The more interesting point concerns the future rather than the past. The size and layout of the interiors, Engel & Völkers says, would allow the villa to be reorganised into several independent residential units and so adapted to the way people live now. For a buyer that changes the arithmetic. A single house of eleven bedrooms in a mountain village has one kind of buyer; a house that can be divided has several, and with them more than one way out.

It is also why the adviser frames the villa as a property for both economic and private use. He calls it a true one-off that pairs a top location with a wide range of possibilities, and adds that houses of this kind rarely come to market. In the desk's experience a heritage house in the mountains is sold when a family decides, not when the market does.

The view

From the terraces the outlook runs along the valley, between the trees and the mountains, as far as Savoy Castle, one of the defining landmarks of Gressoney-Saint-Jean. It is the one thing about a house that no renovation can supply.

How the desk reads it

At €2.9 m the villa costs less than the entry ticket the Ranesta Index sets for St. Moritz (€5.0 m) or Kitzbühel (€4.0 m), and it is a different proposition from either: a historic house in an Italian valley rather than a chalet in a resort. The questions are those of every heritage purchase: what a conversion would cost and what the authorities would allow, what eleven bedrooms cost to keep warm, staffed and insured, and what Italy charges on the way in. The acquisition instrument answers the last; the holding instrument, run for Lake Como as the nearest Italian market here, gives an order of magnitude for the second; the first belongs to a surveyor and a local architect.

The seller's side is well staffed. Engel & Völkers has been in the business since 1977 and is present today with its own and licensed offices in more than 35 countries on five continents. Its Private Office was founded in 2007 for wealthy buyers and for clients whose property portfolios span several markets.

Run the numbers

Acquisition Costs

What a house really costs to walk into, in sixteen jurisdictions, line by line.

Open the instrument