To kick off the year, a new addition has joined us at the site: a specimen tree that was greatly anticipated after picking her out over a year ago at the vivaio (plant nursery). I’d been looking forward to this day for a long time and just a few days into this new year, it finally came.

Well, we’re finally here…to this current month (barely!) and almost caught up for the year. Whew! It was a nice way to focus for me and really recount the year for myself and for this written record.

As the autumn approached we continued forward and onward and hoped to get as much done as possible before the colder/wetter winter approached.

The month of August kicked off for us in Iceland for another retreat…our first outside of Italy since pre-covid. It was really nice to get away, and since both of us were gone, it was the first time that neither has been able to be on site.

After an eventful May with several projects and steps happening on the house, it also was a month where I was mostly away in the US and we also got the sad news about the passing of our geometra from covid…

After looking back at my last proper post of the year in mid-April (!! yikes !!) about la pietra, I figured that the natural progression would be to sum up the rest of the year from that point.

I was sitting here today evening thinking how I felt like updating this blog. I knew it had been so long -

too long -

the long that makes you not want to look at how long, and so the time keeps passing.

Besides the interior stone and marble details that I’ve been working on, the major decision of which pietra (stone) to use on the exterior section of the house was recently made as well.

Recently I’ve been working more and more on the interior details behind the scenes as the main building steps are inching along. As you’ve probably read through the past posts, the stone details are quickly becoming a new obsession for me.

The window and door frames have now been remounted, but not all have been refinished in plaster, as we have to wait once again for the worker who did this part to return in May. However in the meantime, other steps have been completed.

I think it’s time for some progress updates, no? Besides being several months since writing a progress post, it’s also now been over a year since we officially broke ground mid Feb last year. Springtime has begun, and we here in Italy are unfortunately in a similar situation as spring 2020.

One of the pieces of advice that I was given and have kept in mind throughout this process was something J told me at the beginning of this adventure. He said to make a list of my “non-negotiables”, those things I really wanted to be included in the final project, even the “splurges”.

One of my new obsessions has been visiting the stoneyards to look through the various marble slabs and chunks of other type of pietra from around the area.

So here we have it: the final tiles from the full process over these past few months. And yes this has all been for just over 1 square-meter of wall space in the bathroom, but yes, it has all been worth it.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about the handmade tiles, but in these next installments of the ‘tales of tiles’ posts there are some exciting updates as now we have the finished products in hand.

We are now in the fourth week of plasterwork and the rooms are coming together one by one. The house is full of plaster and our clothes (and hair and pockets and ears and phones and gloves) are full of powder. 

Over the past couple of months I’ve been asked to share my story through some online interviews and feel lucky to have been able to have these conversations! I wanted to share links to them here for anyone who would like to read more.

It’s a new year and although it’s felt like we’ve just been in some strange time warp for months now, I am trying to stay hopeful that this year will bring some better things ahead.

After I found my favorite Etruscan pattern I went to work to create the repeating tile pattern. Simplifying a bit and inverting the original so that the darker teardrop shapes resembled cypress tress which dot the landscape. 

In general, my idea for the overall interior concept was to keep everything quite neutral, paired back, and artisan. However, there were a couple of small spaces in the house that I’d had these long-held ideas of where I’d like to bring in more of a flair and unusual element to the design.