As previously mentioned, the official plans on file with the comune of Montepulciano show the first floor as being the living/family room and kitchen of the apartment. We plan to use the first floor to house two en-suite bedrooms instead. The buildings across the street block the beautiful valley views that are available from the second floor, and we’d rather preserve them for our waking hours. Who needs a valley view when they’re sleeping…
The big X on the left of the graphic denotes the stairs that come up from the ground floor and turn the corner along the back wall of the apartment. Continuing along the back wall, you arrive at the steps for accessing the second floor. To give you sense of how old things can be in Italy (vs. the US), the back wall of the apartment is the foundation of the church behind and above us and dates back to the mid-1200s.
The blue lines along the edges and down the middle of the drawing indicate the structural stone walls of the apartment and cannot be moved. Any other wall-like elements are not load-bearing and can moved at will (with permission from the comune). The only two windows on the first floor are shown in the front and they are actually of a decent size for an old Italian building. The window on the right (east) goes all the way to the floor and we hope to have this open upon a Juliette balcony.
We’ll also explore in-floor heating for the bathrooms and potentially install a small fireplace in the west bedroom.
West Bedroom (to be)
At some point after we first saw the apartment in 2023, the sellers stripped the entire apartment back to the walls and removed all of the false ceilings that had previously covered the gorgeous and typically Tuscan beam and tile ceilings. The niche on the right looks to be a long-abandoned fireplace – the flue stack is gone and is not really in an ideal place anyways. If we install a fireplace, it will be in the corner to the left of the window. We’ll use the old fireplace niche as decoration, perhaps above a build-in dresser. We’ll also leave much (1/2?) of the stone exposed.
East Bedroom (to be)
The flooring in both future bedrooms is not particularly to our liking and will likely be replaced. Ideally, we’ll install reclaimed terracotta flooring, but this is unfortunately very popular for Tuscan renovations and very expensive. As I mentioned, the window in this bedroom goes to the floor and would be really cool done up as a Juliette balcony.
First Floor Landing
This picture is taken from the back wall of the apartment and shows the stairs going up to the second floor on the left and the openings to the future en-suite bedrooms on the right. The wall you can just barely see on the top-left edge of the photo is the foundation of the church against which many of the townhouses on our part of the street were built. We have some research to do on the exact history of our project apartment but do know that portions of the church are nearly 800 years old.
Leave a Reply