Most Spaniards know Isabel Preysler’s house better than the Zarzuela or La Moncloa palaces. Over the past 35 years, several generations have grown up watching Preysler’s home stories in the magazine “¡Hola!” and posing in every corner of her mansion in Puerta de Hierro: the library of her late husband, the socialist politician Miguel Boyer. , where a portrait of the celebrity by Pinto Coelho hangs; in the entrance hall with checkerboard floor and a painting of his mother-in-law Carlota Salvador y Sáinz de Vicuña signed by Sotomayor; in the indoor swimming pool… The years pass for everyone except for Preysler and his house. This Tuesday, the Disney+ streaming platform released “Isabel Preysler: My Christmas,” a Preyslerian special in which the so-called Queen of Hearts shows how she lives and prepares her house for the Christmas holidays that she will not actually spend there (She will do this in Miami with his children and grandchildren).
Isabel Preysler’s house gained fame long before the foundation stone was laid. In the late 1980s, the socialite and Baroness Carmen Thyssen applied for the 5,045 square meter property on Miraflores Street, then owned by the shipowner Fernando Fernández Tapias. “There was a war over the conspiracy. Isabel took it from Tita in a masterful game of poker. He hit her. Since then, the Baroness hasn’t bought it,” explains journalist Juan Luis Galiacho in an interview with EL PAÍS. According to Galiacho, author of the book Isabel y Miguel (La Esfera de los Libros, 2014), Preysler paid 95 million pesetas for the land at the time, although the central bank is said to have valued it at 253 million. For Heini Thyssen’s wife it seemed like a small thing. “The property was small for us. I need at least 10,000 square meters,” he explained.
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The problems had just begun. In January 1989, a few weeks after a massive general strike against the government of Felipe González, the magazine Tribuna de Actualidad published an exclusive article that shook the foundations of Felipismo. “The Boyer Palace, inside: 2,000 meters built, 44 rooms, 13 bathrooms, 2 swimming pools, a terrace, indoor elevator,” the weekly newspaper led by Julián Lago headlined a report showing the palace’s plans Miguel Boyer, the former González’s economy minister and his second wife, Isabel Preysler, were at the construction site. Panorama, a weekly newspaper run by Grupo Zeta that competed with Tribuna, also published plans and details of the work. Magazines of the time estimated the mansion’s construction budget at 400 million pesetas.
“I didn’t have all the plans for the house, just part of it. But I hired an architect so that he could imagine the size of the entire property based on the documents I had received,” recalls Paparazzi Antonio Montero, author of this exclusive, in conversation with EL PAÍS. “The most noticeable thing was the number of bathrooms. The bathrooms were talked about for months and years,” explains the photographer, who sold the story for more than a million pesetas. “That was a lot of money back then. You could buy an apartment for two or three million,” he remembers.
Isabel Preysler with her daughter Ana Boyer at a time during the recording of “Isabel Preysler: My Christmas.” Disney + (Promoted Photo)
The Boyer mansion’s 13 toilets, 15 sinks, six showers, seven bathtubs and seven bidets became the subject of ridicule. National. “The house has only one possible name, which at first glance may seem shocking, but which over time, out of habit and custom, will sound normal and perhaps even beautiful,” wrote Alfonso Ussía in the newspaper Abc in early 1989. “This house cannot be called anything other than ‘Villa Meona’. Construction begins urgently.” Almost 35 years later, the Spanish continue to refer to Preysler’s house as Villa Meona, a name that, according to those around her, she detests.
Some sources pointed out at the time that businessman José Antonio Ruiz-Mateos, a public enemy of Miguel Boyer since the expropriation of Rumasa in 1983, was the “black hand” behind the then revelation of the plans for the couple’s house. “It wasn’t Ruiz-Mateos. I recently asked this question to journalist Marisa Martín Blázquez, then wife of Antonio Montero. “Both worked at the Korpa agency,” explains Galiacho. “It probably came from the architecture firm,” adds the journalist, who worked at Panorama at the time. Responsible for the construction of the Preyslerian Palace were the architect Carlos Boyer Monsalve, cousin of the former socialist minister; Argentine architect Mario Connio, one of the most sought-after architects by the international jet set; and interior designer Jaime Parladé. “The information came to me through an operator who worked there,” reveals Montero himself.
Miguel Boyer held a press conference to deny some published information about his future home. “This was something unprecedented. A socialist defending this piece of mansion. He had neither head nor tail. I believe that in reality he did it to defend his wife, who was the only one who supported him,” recalls Galiacho, who remembers that the former minister was very alone at the time. “His father, José Boyer, had just died and no one had gone to the funeral. Everyone had abandoned him. “At that press conference he seemed completely unfocused, his glasses even fell off,” he remembers.
The appearance marked a before and after for the beautiful people. According to Galiacho, this was the coup de grace for Boyer and Felipismo. “The unions and the ranks of Alfonso Guerra, the guerrilla movement, were disgusted with Miguel and used the scandal against him,” says the journalist. Everyone seemed to be against the couple’s new house, including some residents of Puerta de Hierro. In 1990, Grazia Bergese, Boyer’s former sister-in-law and neighbor of the mansion, filed a complaint against her for city planning violations. According to Bergese, the paddle tennis court they built did not respect the distance of seven meters from the fence of his chalet. “I have the right to this seven meter distance that the urban planning regulations provide and I intend to go to the end,” said the ex-wife of the painter Agustín Boyer. The work has been temporarily stopped. The dispute lasted years. Miguel Boyer explained to the press that his ex-sister-in-law’s persistent demands were due to issues of “bad neighborhood” and “a personal vendetta.” “My brother and her broke up in a bad way,” he admitted. The case reached the Supreme Court, which issued a ruling in 2000 ordering the demolition of part of the paddle tennis court.
But neither family disputes nor attacks by old political enemies could stop construction. In November 1992, Preysler opened his house with an exclusive exhibition in “Hello!”, in which he showed it “room by room”. The magazine required 32 pages to accommodate nearly fifty photos of the 44 rooms: Boyer’s Library, full of volumes on Egypt and books on mathematics, physics, philosophy and economics; the main living room, decorated with paintings by Tàpies; the dining room with an English table for 14 people, Ming Dynasty vases and a La Granja crystal lamp; the winter pool, decorated with wicker furniture; or Tamara and Ana’s playhouse, made of wood and decorated with real furniture. Not even the heated dog house was spared from the exclusive.
Isabel Preysler in the dining room with an English table for 14 people in her home in Puerta del Hierro (Madrid), in an image from her documentary for Disney+.
The work, which lasted four years, left Preysler without strength and Boyer without political prestige. “We don’t have the budget or health to ever build a house again,” the socialite confessed in an interview with her leading magazine. The only thing readers couldn’t see in this report was the garden, which was still unfinished. Due to water restrictions in the Community of Madrid at the time, the grass had to be planted. “We thought that in this situation it would be best to wait a while before watering could resume,” the homeowner explained. The exclusive issue, published in the midst of the 1992 economic crisis and on the eve of one of the worst recessions in Spain’s history, triggered a media and political storm. “Neither I nor anyone in the editorial team expected the impact the report would have. It was a real revolution,” confirms Tico Chao, long-time journalist for “¡Hola!” and author of the exclusive. “I think in my almost forty years at Hello! “I’ve never seen a story generate so many comments.”
Now the Disney+ platform is announcing Preysler’s documentary reality as an opportunity to find out how the Queen of Hearts lives in her palace. In 1995, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, not the Golden Age playwright but a 32-year-old man who was the socialite’s chauffeur, told Diez Minutos magazine details of Isabel’s domestic life. According to her story, the lady gets up between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon, eats breakfast in her room and organizes her papers until lunchtime, talks on the phone between four and five hours a day and gets an appointment at five with his sports teacher. Calderón de la Barca stated that her employer’s favorite reading material was the tabloids, but she also watched television, knitted and went to the beautician twice a week. From what you see in the documentation, not much has changed.