Henri & June
Giugni

"Henri and June Giugni did not find Somerset Manor — they created it."

What began as a vision rooted in Henri's Swiss heritage and a shared love of the European countryside became a decades-long act of craftsmanship, conservation, and devotion to the land. The Giugnis did not commission a house — they commissioned a world.

Henri, born in southern Switzerland, carried with him a deep reverence for the European landscape — its architecture, its forests, its wildlife. When the couple discovered the Lincoln Road property in the mid-1980s, he saw not a flat Illinois field but the raw material for something extraordinary. Over the following decades, he planted more than 80,000 trees, excavated an 18-acre lake by hand, sculpted a vineyard terrace from the excavated earth, and brought master craftsmen from France and England to build the manor that now stands on the property.

June brought to the project the same entrepreneurial vision and exacting standards that defined her distinguished career in American business. Her sensibility shaped the manor's interiors — the Tiffany lamps, the art, the warmth that transforms a grand architectural statement into a genuine home.

Together, they created something that has no precedent in Illinois — and perhaps in the Midwest. Somerset Manor at Castle Park is their legacy, offered now to the next steward who will carry it forward.