Phoenix! Restoration in Umbria
She knew it was completely crazy, but Penny Radford had just fallen in love with a burned- out ruin perched on a hilltop overlooking the northern Umbrian hamlet of Santa Giuliana.The views were stupendous, the house a total wreck. To even consider restoration was completely unrealistic, an impossible challenge. She bought it of course.
Nine years on, the ruin is now a beautiful country house, a comfortable retreat for the world-weary and their families.
Before embarking on her project, Penny enrolled on a three-month language course at Perugia’s Università per Stranieri in order to help her deal with the arcane vagaries of Italian bureaucracy and, equally as important, to be able to explain to builders and tradesmen her precise requirements. As a result, everyday matters like attempting to buy screws from bemused ironmongers slowly became more manageable, and she no longer dissolved into tears whilst trying to describe requirements for a complex do-it-yourself job.
After a successful London-based career in marketing, Penny was embarking on something completely new, something which was going to test both her stamina and resolve. She readily admits that the first three years were clouded with feelings of disbelief at just what she had taken on. But as she puts it herself: ‘I had burned my bridges and now I just had to get on with it.’
The first practical step was to find a builder willing to undertake the mammoth restoration work. Initially she was met with scepticism. In this very traditional society, the idea of a builder taking instruction from a foreign woman living alone up a mountain in the middle of nowhere did not sit comfortably! However, with much persuasion the work eventually started. Slowly, as tradesmen realised that she knew what she wanted and was sympathetic to traditional methods of building, their enthusiasm grew. Her grand vision and attention to detail earned respect, and very quickly a creative working team was established. The first part of the original farmhouse began to take shape and Penny now had a roof, if not a terribly large one, over her head.
Rescue Work
A passionate gardener, Penny wanted to start work on her land immediately rather than wait until every last piece of restoration work had been completed on the farmhouse and outbuildings. But the garden was non-existent - it was just an overgrown hillside with some olive trees and several mountains of builder’s rubble. Most of the wildlife of Umbria had taken up residence in thickets of impenetrable brambles and nettles three feet high. Decades of peaceful co-existence between bats, lizards, snakes, wild hare and the occasional trundling cinghiale (wild boar) were about to be disturbed. A long, sweeping gravel drive was installed, complemented with two rows of tall, slender cypresses, leading to the main house. Some of the mature olives were successfully transplanted, lilac trees planted, pergolas built, terraces laid and Archibald the rooster, with his happy consort of hens, moved into the coop.
The 13th-century olive mill adjacent to the main farmhouse was next on the list. It was converted into a delightful apartment on two floors with its own elevated terrace sitting above an abundant fig tree which acts as a shady resting place for Penny’s guardians - the labradors. With their slowly wagging tails and quiet curiosity they are an integral part of Prato di Sotto and seem to think that the surrounding splendour has been created purely and simply for them. It would be nice if this were true, but they have to share the space with Penny’s human guests too. And not only humans, for Penny has a habit of collecting waifs and strays. The labradors happily share their domain with an assortment of abandoned hunting dogs and pregnant cats rescued from car parks.
