SvevaClavarino

Italian by blood, Ligurian by heart, London by choice.

Sveva Clavarino grew up between Genoa and Rome, in a family whose inherited mantra was simple enough to live by: family and art come first. At eighteen she left for London to read Business Management at Queen Mary University, and stayed.

She is a certified integrative nutrition health coach. What began as a private search for a steadier way of living became The Wellness Reporter, a holistic wellbeing platform built to share what she had learned with anyone trying to live more consciously. She writes about food, travel, retreats and the unglamorous work of feeling well.

Alongside her sister Giorgina, she has become one of the more quietly recognisable faces of Italian style abroad. The British press has taken to calling them Valentino's favourite sisters. Her own register is softer than the label suggests: long flowered dresses, wide brims, coastline light, and a preference for the slow over the loud.

“Rooted in a love for tradition, beauty and slow living.” On her work, 84 Rooms

There is nothing timid about fuchsia.

In Italian, diva was never an insult. It was a title, and it was earned. It belonged to the women who walked into a room and quietly rearranged it, who knew exactly what they wanted and were not especially interested in apologising for it. Sveva belongs to that lineage.

She has a temperament and she does not file it down for company. Her standards are high and she says so, out loud, usually before you have finished asking. Anyone who works with her learns fast that the shortest route to her good opinion is to care as much as she does. The table is set properly or it is not set at all.

It shows first in the clothes. Head to toe fuchsia silk against Roman travertine is not a shy choice, it is a declaration made in colour. The wide brims, the dark glasses, the ballooned sleeves: none of it is decoration. It is a woman who has decided that presence is a discipline, and that beauty is worth the trouble it costs.

And then the volume drops. The same person who takes a room takes a retreat, a coastline, an afternoon in Recco watching artisans paint her plates one at a time. That is the full register, from the loudest pink in the piazza to the quietest table in Liguria, crossed without dropping a stitch.

Not all of it happens in Italy. She keeps a close attachment to the golf club at Bodrum, on the Turkish Aegean, and returns to it the way other people return to a house. The light there is different, harder and whiter than Liguria, and the days follow a rhythm she has never had to explain to anyone. It is one of the few places where the diva is entirely off duty.

Via Garibaldi, 1558.

Palazzo Spinola stands on Via Garibaldi, the street of palaces that made Genoa a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was commissioned in 1558 by the diplomat and banker Angelo Giovanni Spinola, at the height of the Italian Renaissance.

The Clavarino family bought it in 2017. Sveva’s uncle, Carlo Clavarino, gave it six years of restoration. Today Sveva and Giorgina live there, and work with his Friends of Genoa foundation to open the palazzo and the city to a wider audience.

It is the reference point for everything else. The table she designs for, the coastline her ceramics come from, the tradition she keeps circling back to, all of it starts here.

• Built1558, Italian Renaissance
• Commissioned byAngelo Giovanni Spinola, diplomat and banker
• AddressVia Garibaldi, Genoa · UNESCO World Heritage
• RestoredSix years, by Carlo Clavarino, from 2017
• FoundationFriends of Genoa