Preview - A Small House in the Hills

The client bought the house on the basis of a photograph. She had never been to Umbria. She arrived to find a structure that had not been inhabited since the 1970s, with no running water, no electricity, and a roof that was structurally adequate in summer only.

We spent the first year doing nothing but infrastructure. The second year we concentrated on the materials: local stone recovered from a collapsed outbuilding next door, chestnut timber from a forest cooperative in the Apennines, lime plaster mixed on site. The third year was the furniture — almost entirely made by a joiner in Perugia from my drawings. The client has never expressed any regret.

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