The Nook has a new partner. Aidan is an architect of beautiful buildings, a friend, and a perfect fit for our slightly unconventional little team. He came to San Donato to visit the house recently, walked through its tiny rooms, understood almost immediately what we, Rocco and Zaffrin, had seen in it and fell in love with it too.
There is something infectious about The Nook when you are standing inside it. You begin looking past what is there now and imagining what it might become. Aidan understood the vision and wanted a slice of the fun and adventure of bringing it to life. For Rocco and Zaffrin, the opportunity to bring another creative mind into The Nook, with a different perspective but an aligned vision, felt like a little moment of magic.
Three Friends, One Tiny House in Italy
So now we are three friends trying to do something beautiful. We live in different countries and places, have complementary skills and come at the house from different perspectives, which is becoming one of the most enjoyable parts of the project.
We each notice different things and bring different ideas, instincts and obsessions to the house. Sometimes one of us sees something the others haven't. Sometimes an idea gets challenged and becomes much better because of it. We have spent time together at the house in Italy, but when we are apart we have Zoom calls looking at drawings, moving things around and allowing the design to keep evolving.
On this last trip, we declined social invitations and essentially disappeared into The Nook for two days. We measured, drew, talked, changed our minds and then talked some more. Conversations about the house continued late into the night. It is becoming a collaboration as much as a renovation.
Two Days Measuring Every Centimetre of The Nook
Zaffrin had imagined measuring the house would take about an hour.
It did not.
For the best part of two days (with long lunches in between), Zaffrin and Rocco held the measuring tape while Aidan gradually built The Nook in SketchUp. Every wall, opening, vault, corner and tiny turn in the house had to make its way from the tape measure into his computer. Watching this happen gave us a completely new appreciation of what it actually takes to create an accurate measured drawing of an old house.
The Nook, unsurprisingly, does not contain many straight lines.
Stopping to measure it properly we noticed details more closely. The vaulted ceilings are hand-plastered, slightly uneven and completely individual. Walls that look straight are not quite straight. Corners have their own peculiar angles. Tiny changes in level appear where you don't expect them. What initially might have felt like imperfections, felt like a record of the people who had made and altered the house over generations.
It also turns out that enthusiasm for holding a measuring tape is not constant throughout an entire day. After lunch, one member of the team became noticeably less committed to the accuracy and urgency of the measuring process than the other two. We won't name names but at one point she lay on the floor of The Nook and did nothing.
Parking our car
There were lovely little moments among all the measuring and designing too. But on the last trip we managed, for the first time, to park our car directly outside The Nook. All three of us cheered. It felt ridiculous, but the house felt like ours. Perhaps renovation is made up of these tiny milestones as much as the big ones.
Designing a Small House for Light, Space and the Details
Once the measured drawings began taking shape, so did the questions.
What is our philosophy for lighting? Where should the sockets sit? How should a handrail look and feel? Where should one material stop and another begin? What do you see when you wake up in bed? How does your eye travel through the house?
We spent a perhaps surprising amount of time talking about wall render. We talked about how to tank the cantina and how to deal with an old building that needs to breathe while also becoming a comfortable home. And somewhere among all those conversations, we made one enormous change to the design. It has completely altered the way we think about one part of the house. More on that shortly.
Through all of it, we keep returning to the same question how do we make a very small house feel generous? How do we create something that feels genuinely special without trying to make the house into something it isn't?
A Vaulted Ceiling, Light and a Possible New Window
One of the ideas we are most excited about is creating an extraordinary vaulted ceiling above the bed, creating height, drama and a sense of space in one of the smallest parts of the house.
We are also exploring whether we might be able to introduce a small roof window, subject, to the necessary permissions. We found ourselves looking at aerial views of San Donato to see whether there were other examples nearby and trying to understand what might be possible. We think there may be an opportunity for a small conservation-style roof window, but that is another part of the adventure still to be worked through.
We are always thinking about light and shadow, and about using organic and tactile materials that feel right in an old stone house rather than fighting against it. In a house this small, every design decision has to earn its place. We want moments of openness and surprise while keeping the simplicity and character that made us fall in love with The Nook in the first place. The house is small, but we want it to tell its story section by section.
Handmade Italian Tiles from Umbria
We are also hoping to source tiles from an extraordinary artisanal producer in Perugia. They are rich and full of variation, the kind of material where no two pieces are quite the same. Samples are on their way, and we are impatiently waiting to see them in the actual space.
Increasingly, that is what we want from The Nook. Character, craftsmanship and things that reveal the hand of the person who made them. There is something particularly satisfying about restoring a small house in Italy using materials made by Italian craftspeople. We want the materials themselves to have stories and to feel as though they belong here.
The Pleasure Is in the Details
Then there are the tiny details, which are giving us a perhaps unreasonable amount of satisfaction.
We have started collecting small pieces of furniture before some of the rooms they will live in even properly exist. One of our first finds is a beautiful old iron table with a tin top that Rocco found. There is something rather poetic about finding an object, knowing instinctively that it belongs in the house, and then designing its surroundings.
The Nook is emerging through SketchUp drawings and measurements, but also through these objects, conversations, materials and moments of instinct.
Designing a House Together, From Different Places
We don't have it all figured out, and increasingly we think that might be part of the pleasure.
We enjoy the back and forth between us. We try to be open and honest when something isn't working, to challenge each other's thinking without becoming too precious about our own ideas, and sometimes simply to give an idea enough space to sit for a while.
Living in different places means the project develops in bursts. Conversations across screens, photographs and architectural drawings sent backwards and forwards, then planning when the three of us will be back together in San Donato, looking at the real thing (and discovering that the house has an opinion of its own).
Perhaps that is part of why projects like this are so invigorating. Lots of people dream about buying a house in Italy, owning a place with friends, restoring something together or making something simply because they believe it could be beautiful. There are probably very sensible reasons not to do it. We may discover some of them along the way.
But there is also something joyful about bringing together three different ways of seeing things, giving ourselves permission to experiment and seeing what emerges.
At the end of two days of measuring, designing, debating wall finishes, discussing the cantina, moving things around in SketchUp and staying up far too late talking about a very small house, we did what felt like the only sensible thing left to do.
We went for gelato.
For now, we are three friends, living in different places, obsessing over a tiny house in an Italian village. We are learning as we go, changing our minds, collecting beautiful things, debating sockets and handrails, and slowly turning an idea into a place.
We don't quite know what it will become yet. Perhaps that's part of the adventure.
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.
