A shower room problem and a marble find

We have discovered that summer in Italy is not the season for getting building work done. Between the heat, holidays and festa season, work on The Nook came to a fairly predictable halt. We knew it would.

So rather than fighting the Italian calendar, we spent the pause doing something that turns out to be just as important. Thinking. And talking. And measuring. And changing our minds.

With a house this small, there isn't much room for getting things wrong.

The bathroom problem

Before we bought The Nook, there was one fairly fundamental question we had to answer. Where do you put a bathroom?

The house didn't have one. There was a small toilet tucked beneath the stairs, but no shower or proper bathroom.

Our first thought, bear with us, was to build a luxurious spa bathroom in the cantina. One of us was already looking up infrared saunas and wet rooms. There is more room down there and, on paper at least, it was the obvious solution.

In reality, it would mean leaving the main house every time you wanted a shower.

One of us didn't give much thought to wandering outside wrapped in a towel. The other was a staunch no to appearing in a fluffy bathrobe for the entertainment of San Donato.

So the bathroom had to come inside the main house.

That sounds like a fairly simple decision. It wasn't.

Making one tiny floor do three jobs

When you enter The Nook, you arrive on a very small floor that needs to work surprisingly hard. It has to be an entrance hall. We want a tiny kitchenette. And somehow, within the same footprint, we need to fit a proper shower room.

We sometimes treat The Nook a little like we have bought a boat. To be honest, we may still buy a boat (but that is for another story). Every centimetre has to earn its keep.

We have spent a lot of time standing in the middle of the first floor, which doesn’t have much room,  trying to imagine the space, which eventually led us to thinking about glass and ironwork.

The plan at the moment is for a fluted glass partition to divide the shower room from the entrance and kitchenette. It should make the two areas feel distinct without putting a solid wall between them and making both feel cramped.

There is another reason for the glass. The only window on this floor falls within what will become the shower room. We could accept a dark entrance, but that seems a terrible shame. Instead, bespoke hand made iron-framed glass panes should allow daylight to travel from the bathroom window into the entrance beyond.

At least, that is the theory.

A piece of Italian marble

One thing we do already have is the beginning of the bathroom sink.

We found a wonderful piece of Italian marble while wandering around one of the Valley's mercatini, which are something between an antique shop and a junk shop. We love these warehouses. Sometimes you walk in and it looks as though absolutely nothing has been thrown away in Italy since about 1953. Then, amongst all of it, you find something exquisite.

This was one of those days.

The beautifully shaped marble had originally been made as a vanity top and has lovely defined grooves cut into the stone. When we searched for anything similar online, including on Pamono, we realised quite how expensive something like it would be new or sourced form a specialist (many thousands of euros it seems). Ours cost a fraction of that and came with the added satisfaction of having been found by us rather than simply ordered.

There was, inevitably, a problem.

It doesn't fit.

It is slightly too deep for the space, so we will need to trim it from the back without disturbing the shaping around the front. We are also going to lose the existing vanity underneath it and build a bespoke stand, with the basin sitting on top and brass taps coming directly from the wall.

This is becoming something of a theme at The Nook. Find something we love, discover it doesn't quite work, stare at it for a while and work out how to make it belong.

Then there is the plumbing

Of course, talking about marble, fittings and brass taps is considerably more enjoyable than talking about waste pipes.

Eventually, somebody has to work out where the water goes.

One of us has been charged with dealing with the plumbing. The other is rather more focused on watching YouTube videos about handmade tiles and mosaic patterns (which will come, all in good time).

Adding a proper shower means upgrading the existing pipework and establishing exactly how the house connects, or can connect, to the main sewer system. We need to understand the route, work out what can be accommodated within the existing structure and speak to the Comune in San Donato (which is essentially the local municipality and administrative division for the area). 

We spent plenty of time before buying The Nook thinking about tiles, old stone, furniture and lighting. We spent considerably less time dreaming about the diameter of waste pipes.

Fortunately, plenty of old floor tiles need to come up anyway, so we should be able to run new pipework beneath the floor without sacrificing precious ceiling height.

Then there is the hot water. At the moment, The Nook has a tiny boiler that appears to have served a sink that once sat inside the house. A shower and two small kitchen areas obviously require something rather more substantial.

Another problem for another day.

Learning to go slowly

Perhaps that is why the summer pause hasn't been such a bad thing.

There is a rhythm to trying to renovate a house in an Italian village, and we are slowly learning not to fight it. There are tradespeople to find, old buildings to understand, practical questions to take to the Comune and, occasionally, an entire village seemingly distracted by a festa.

There are also decisions that seem obvious on Monday and completely wrong by Thursday.

The Nook had sat largely untouched for decades, and the more time we spend there, the more we understand why. A conventional layout doesn't really work. You have to look at it differently.

Put a bathroom somewhere unexpected. Borrow light from one room for another. Make furniture for spaces that were never designed to contain it. Search mercatini for things you didn't know you needed.

And occasionally ask a piece of Italian marble to become smaller than it would ideally like to be.

There is risk in that. Some of our ideas may not work, and we will almost certainly change our minds again. But that is also what makes the project interesting.

We aren't trying to squeeze all the components of a normal house into a very small one. We are trying to work out what this particular little house needs, and make every decision feel as though it was always meant to be there.

There may not have been much building this summer. But somehow, between the measuring, the mercatini, the imaginary walls, the plumbing puzzles and the endless conversations, The Nook has still been taking shape.

Project Details

Location: San Donato Val di Comino, Lazio, Italy

Property: Historic stone village house

Project: The Nook

Key architectural feature: Traditional stone groin vaults

Focus: Slow restoration, thoughtful design and preserving traditional craftsmanship

The Nook Journal

The Nook Journal follows our restoration of a tiny historic stone house in San Donato Val di Comino, Italy. Through these journal entries we share the design decisions, craftsmanship, village life and small discoveries that come with bringing an old building back to life, one step at a time.