Located in the Vinho Verde wine region, the 23,700-square-foot Villa Beatriz has been in the same family since the early 1900s. Now the home is looking for a new steward
4 min
In the early 1870s, Francisco Antunes de Oliveira Guimarães, a teenager from a rural corner of northern Portugal, made his way to Brazil. By century’s end he was a wealthy financier, and in the early years of the new century, he completed a palatial, three-story manor house for himself and his new bride, Beatriz, in the heart of Portugal’s Vinho Verde wine region. The nearly 100-acre property, reinvented in the 1990s as a thriving wine estate, has been the family seat ever since.
The property, with the main home’s original furniture and decorations largely intact, is now set to pass out of the family for the first time. The estate is on the market for roughly $8.2 million, a price that includes original hand-carved furniture fashioned from exotic tropical hardwood, according to Francisco’s granddaughter, Carmen Guimarães, 90, who has lived on the property since the early 1990s. Known as Villa Beatriz, in honor of Francisco’s bride, the 23,700-square-foot home has 13 bedrooms and eight bathrooms. With a number of outbuildings, it has over an acre of formal gardens decorated with classical statuary. The gardens, like the house itself, have been designated a historic landmark.
Carmen is selling the property along with her two daughters, Anabela Guimarães, 70, and Alexandra Guimarães, 67. Carmen says Francisco, born into a family of modest local landowners, was a Rio de Janeiro financial tycoon who started out selling lottery tickets and ended up founding a large bank. Still, he remained rooted in the area around the Ave River, which runs through the estate.
Built in an opulent Belle Époque-style, Villa Beatriz is a fusion of Brazilian materials and Portuguese craftsmanship. Rooms are presided over by intricate stucco ceilings. Atmospheric wall paintings, featuring everything from hunting scenes to tributes to Portugal’s Age of Exploration, decorate the walls of the main floor’s reception rooms and the bedrooms on the second floor. Even the onetime staff rooms, on the top floor, still have elaborate antique beds made from cherry wood.
Villa Beatriz is an imaginative blending of historical styles, says Tobias Hoffmann, director of Berlin’s Bröhan Museum, known for its collection of modern European decorative arts. The neo-Moorish tiled facade—which can be the same shade of blue as the Minho sky—gives way to a fanciful entrance hall decorated with neo-Renaissance trompe-l’oeil wall paintings. The formal dining room is a freewheeling mix of both Moorish and Renaissance touches, he says, while second-floor bedrooms have a neo-Rococo flair.
The estate has had its share of sorrows. Beatriz, Francisco’s wife, died before she could ever see the house he built for her. A generation later, Carmen, who never really knew her grandfather, moved there at age 12 to live with her aunt and uncle after both her parents died within a matter of months. A widow herself since 2010, Carmen is still active, and has more recently overseen the maintenance and restoration of the house on her own. “It looks exactly the same as it did when I was growing up,” she says.
The estate is located east of the city of Braga in the Vinho Verde region, which is known for its light, slightly fizzy, affordable whites. The Guimarães family had long produced wine for private consumption, but starting in the early 1990s Carmen and her late husband, textile manufacturer Carlos Alberto Rodrigues Guimarães, launched a modern commercial winemaking facility. They named their flagship wine Quinta Villa Beatriz, after the estate, and put the house itself on the label. Spread across 30 acres, the vines grow classic Vinho Verde white grape varieties, including Loureiro and Trajadura.
Though things have stayed pretty much the same at Villa Beatriz, the Vinho Verde region is undergoing its own reinvention, says José Ferreira, a sommelier at Lisbon’s Michelin-starred Belcanto restaurant. “Some great wines are starting to be produced there,” he says, citing a new wave of winemakers who are replacing traditional varieties with Alvarinho, a premium white grape that does well on either side of the Spanish-Portuguese border.
The prices of wine estates in Vinho Verde are increasing dramatically, but can still be far less than those of the adjacent Douro Valley, which produces Portugal’s most expensive wines, says Artur Pinto Leite, a senior consultant at the Porto office of Savills, who specializes in wine estates. Top Douro Valley wine estates can fetch prices in excess of $109,000 per hectare, he says—a level that can only be reached in Vinho Verde if Alvarinho has already been planted. The price of luxury homes in the two regions can vary dramatically, adds Pinto Leite, depending on ocean access in the case of Vinho Verde, and river proximity in the Douro areas.
Carmen and her daughters aren’t especially big wine drinkers, they say. But Anabela, who raised her own family not far away, can sound wistful while giving a tour of the winery her father built. Now a grandmother herself, the retired textile-company executive likes to recall that she was married in the manor house, as were her children. “My heart is here,” she says, of the property.
Her mother, however, is looking forward to the next chapter. Still managing daily trips up and down her imposing staircase, she is thrilled at the thought of moving to a home with only one story—and a fraction of the upkeep. And when it comes to wine, she has a confession to make: “I prefer a glass of Port.”
Ruy Nogueira of Luximos/Christie’s International Real Estate is handling the sale.
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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
