Renovating a Hundreds-Year-Old Italian Trullo Taught Me a Few Things
I almost had a nervous breakdown but I'm completely in love with my little 'hobbit house' (lots of pics included)
When I first started meeting people in the southern Italian region of Puglia1 and told them I was renovating a trullo—a stone hut with a conical roof indigenous to the region—I got a lot of "good luck with that" and "oh yeah, been there, done that" followed by nervous laughter.
I tend to be an overly optimistic person and my reaction to this was no exception. I was sure it would be different for me because…well…it just would. I tuned out the naysayers and held tight to my belief that everything would go smoothly for me.
Perhaps I thought this because we were talking about a space of about 300 square feet, that I had come to affectionately describe as my “hobbit house.”
How hard could that be?
How long could it possibly take to renovate 300 square feet? (This would become a worn-out mantra for me as the months ticked by with no finished trullo in sight.)
The space was being turned into a tiny home with one room for sleeping and living, a kitchenette, and a bathroom, along with outdoor space covered by a pergola with a small outdoor kitchens, seating area and dining table. The people I was talking to were speaking of much bigger projects—creating large homes out of one or more trulli.
So it wasn't the same thing, really.
Except it kind of was.
At the end of the day, we were all talking about renovating old structures with all kinds of limitations regarding what can and can't be done with them. Pretty much everything has to be custom made—doors, windows, kitchen cabinets—because every trullo is different and oddly shaped.
For example, you don't just walk into a showroom and pick out your doors and then they are installed. You can say the kind you want, but then someone has to come and do all sorts of measuring and other things I don't understand. It requires multiple visits, which, again, I can't explain. That can't be done until the structure is nearly finished, and then it's two full months before you will see those doors. This is just one small example of the limitations.
Every decision, from whether I could have a closet carved into the deep stone wall (yes) or add a window (no), had to be approved by what Italians call a geometra. There’s no real English translation for this word. The closest would be a “surveyor,” but that really doesn’t capture the amount of power these people have. They are demigods. If you want to make a change to the original plan—which I did, when I decided I wanted to add a windowed door to the back of the trullo to get more light—it has to be resubmitted for approval.
I went into this understanding these limitations, but when we were told the builder we hired in April 2024 would deliver a ready-to-move-into trullo in December 2024 this seemed reasonable, especially since the space was only 300 square feet as you can see in the pictures below.