This 17th-Century Spanish Palace Garden Inspires Beauty and Tranquility at Every Turn
“I found something amazing—you must come see,” Spanish interior designer Luis Puerta instructed his longtime collaborator landscape designer Álvaro Sampedro. As it turns out, recalls Sampedro, amazing was perhaps an understatement.
Just 50 minutes outside of Madrid, Puerta had discovered a 17th-century palace in near ruin in a little village named Tendilla close to Guadalajara. Behind it, a “jungle, an incredible paradise,” notes Sampedro, in need of rescue. There were hints of an orchard, creeks, and a kitchen garden, he recalls, but whatever overarching design there may have once been had long succumbed to neglect.
Near the outset of the six-year restoration project that followed, Sampedro made a serendipitous discovery of his own. “I uncovered old garden lines similar to the design of the chapel’s cupola,” says the landscape designer of an original plot set near the house.
He salvaged those lines to revitalize the garden’s octagon-inspired layout (mimicking the chapel’s crowning structure), now outlined in boxwood and alive with roses. Nearby he added a new fountain pool and a perennial garden lush with grasses, Nepeta, salvia, and irises—“serene blues and purples”—as well as a kitchen garden, where willow raised beds are filled with aromatics, herbs, and a medley of vegetables.
“I like a sense of quiet order, especially near the house, then as you go down the paths, the garden loosens up to blend with the fields and trees beyond,” says Sampedro, who saved and revived older trees and liberally interspersed new cypresses “to give vertical lift, unifying the ground and sky.”
Speaking of lift, some 15 species of roses grace pergolas and arches, while Boston ivy climbs the palace walls. “My client is a creator of magnificent spaces, a lover of beauty and tranquility, so I approached this garden similarly as if it was an interior space, with places to nap, have tea with friends, to play,” says Sampedro, who composed every detail, from the sound of the gravel underfoot to the whiffs of jasmine. “I love how a garden is never finished and always changing—something curious and amazing all year long.”
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