AT PAZO DE LA CUESTA, a Galician wine estate in the far northwest of Spain, the hands on the manor-house clock are turning again. Set above a portico of the facade, the clock was originally installed in the 1860s, when the home, which is thought to date back to the 16th century, got a high-Victorian refurbishment. But since sometime around the Spanish Civil War, the clock — much like the estate itself — had been frozen in time. Now, both are receiving a thoughtful upgrade courtesy of Manuel Bellod Álvarez de Lorenzana, who represents the 14th generation of his family to own the place.
Bellod and his American husband, Hamilton South, both 58, divide their time between an 18th-century Connecticut farmhouse, an Art Deco Manhattan high-rise and two outposts in Spain; in addition to Pazo de la Cuesta, they share a 1970s home in Marbella, the city where Bellod, who was born in Madrid, spent much of his childhood. A trained classical pianist, Bellod retired from investment banking in 2015 and has spent his time since earning advanced degrees in mathematics and learning about wine. Although he inherited the estate from his father in 1998, he left it largely untouched for the next two decades. But in 2015, he decided to update the 100-acre property and eventually open a winery. He grafted local heritage varieties — including newly fashionable white Godello grapes and the traditional Mencía, known for producing aromatic reds — to the existing vines. Meanwhile, he and South, an executive at the New York City conglomerate Standard Industries, turned their attention to the house itself.
While there was a certain amount of structural work that needed to be done, the couple didn’t want to modernize the house’s aesthetics so much as personalize them. Not that they could’ve gutted the place even if they’d wanted to; national and regional heritage laws prevent owners of historic Galician homes from undertaking full-scale renovations. Instead, Bellod says his aim was to restore the pazo — the regional term refers to Galicia’s distinctive manor houses — to “turn the house back to what it was 150 years ago.” He’s repainted walls, reupholstered furniture and even reconfigured part of the third floor to create a primary suite, but his inspiration has always been what was already there. “If a room was pink, I am going to paint it pink,” he says. “I don’t think I have the right to change it.”
GALICIA ANCHORS WHAT is often referred to as green Spain: a verdant, mountainous region at the top of the Iberian Peninsula. Galician manor-house décor, in contrast, is often predominantly brown, filled with heavy wood-and-leather reproductions in the style of the country’s 17th-century golden age. When Bellod took possession of Pazo de la Questa, many of the rooms looked much as they had in the 19th century, when his great-great-grandparents rebuilt the house — damaged, family lore has it, during Spain’s Napoleonic-era wars — and dressed it up in the ornate style associated with the scandal-plagued Queen Isabella II, for whom Bellod says his great-great-grandfather served as a lawyer.
When Bellod’s parents reopened the pazo in the mid-1970s, after nearly four decades of vacancy following the civil war, it was “like the house was haunted,” Bellod says, scattered with dead flies and 1930s toiletries. He and his siblings were “afraid to leave our bedrooms,” he recalls. His father, an architect, cleaned things up and repaired the leaky roof of the home, which was originally one of several summer outposts for the family, wealthy Galician landowners who also inhabited a neo-Classical palace in Madrid. When the palace was sold in the 2000s, some of its furnishings ended up in the pazo, including the golden-edged deep-pile carpets that were custom-made by Madrid’s Royal Tapestry Factory.
The approximately 23,000-square-foot manor house has some 50 rooms (“I’ve never counted,” Bellod says), with three-foot-thick stone walls covered in plasterwork, and is approached via a pollarded arbor of plane trees. Inside, an entrance hall holds four carved wooden benches, likely from the 19th century and decorated with reliefs of cherubs playing musical instruments and family coats of arms. Bellod and South’s contribution to this space is a set of four delicate French oil paintings bought at auction in 2021. The works of an unknown 18th-century artist, each depicts the bust of a woman dressed to represent a different continent.
The suite of rooms just beyond, which the Bellod family refers to as the bishop’s quarters — suitable, in its day, for hosting a visiting cleric — has a salon done in neo-Rococo style, with Louis XV-style furniture, a painted ceiling set off by Rococo-revival rocaille trim and a pastoral wall mural. In the east wing, along with a billiards room, there’s a dining room with a massive wood table, likely from the 19th century, and neo-Renaissance chairs, as well as a domed brass ceiling fixture decorated with glass gems. According to Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack, an editor and decorative arts researcher at New York’s Hispanic Society, Museum & Library, the lamp recalls the Visigothic votive crowns that were given as offerings to early medieval churches. After the ornaments were unearthed by archaeologists in 19th-century Spain, they became an interiors motif.
Adjoining the dining room is the stone-covered terrace, where the couple like to play canasta at a painted-wicker table that South bought from a French dealer last year. They spend much of their time there, or in the second-floor music room, where a newly installed TV shares space with a mix of antique instruments (a mechanical organ, a harmonium) courtesy of Bellod’s forebears. More family memorabilia — silver-thread turkey curios made by a Bellod ancestor — perch behind two barrel-backed Renzo Mongiardino armchairs from the mid-70s.
Bellod’s favorite room in the house, though, is a second-story sun porch with arched, Islamic-revival-style windows and walls covered in deliriously geometric Andalusian tiles. Furnished with vintage wicker chairs and tables, and a ceramics collection that mixes old family pieces from Seville with newly purchased platters from Italy, the gallery, as Bellod refers to it, overlooks the gardens and 19th-century fountains. The couple’s bedroom, which is book-lined and double height, shares the top floor of the house with an unrenovated wing of former servants’ quarters. Above the headboard, a painting of St. John the Baptist once owned by their friend the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta and given to them by his widow, Annette, Bellod says, serves as a souvenir of their time in the Dominican Republic, where, at one point, they owned a home near the de la Rentas’ island estate.
FOR CENTURIES, GALICIA was one of Spain’s poorest regions, with a neo-feudal social order that lasted well into the 20th century. At the pazo, that legacy can be found in the neo-Classical chapel, where generations of Bellod’s ancestors are entombed. In an antechamber is a closet full of robes made from his great-great-grandmother’s discarded gowns, worn by the bishop when presiding over daily Mass and the family’s annual memorial church service.
For Bellod, who still holds the memorial annually, the ceremony is another means of honoring the past while embracing the future. Last year, he released the first 50,000 bottles of his new premium wines (sold under the name Pazo de La Cuesta). Now, he’s planning to open some of the formal first-floor rooms to the public in a bid to turn the place into a day-trip destination for vinophiles. He’s also readying a solar power system. But despite these innovations, the pazo remains, as it has been for centuries, very much a family estate. And thanks, in part, to the new updates, Bellod’s older sister and three younger brothers, along with their children, are now spending more time here as well. This summer, they plan to make use of the new outdoor pool, which was built out of reclaimed materials from the property’s derelict barns and dwellings. And what would previous generations of the clan make of this iteration of the pazo? “I think,” Bellod says, “they would love it.”
