Filicudi, Aeolian Islands, Sicily
The walls went up in 2013. Then, for more than a decade, nothing else happened: no water, no power, not even a door that locked. This is the story of the three months it took two people to finish what someone else started, mostly by hand, on an island with no roads to bring anything in on.
Where we started
The house wasn't quite a ruin when we found it, but it wasn't far off. Someone had rebuilt it from an actual ruin back in 2013, stone walls and a proper roof, and then simply stopped. For over ten years it sat there exactly like that: a bare concrete shell above the water, no plumbing, no electricity, the odd bucket of old plaster left behind by whoever was last inside.
There's no road to this side of the island, which meant nothing arrived the easy way. Cement, tiles, tools, the lot came over by boat and then up the paths on foot or on the back of a three-wheeled Ape, the way most things still move around Filicudi. Some days the work waited on the sea being calm enough to land a delivery at all.
Clearing out the room, we found the original floor still there under years of dust and debris: hand-painted hydraulic tiles in blue and terracotta, the kind nobody makes the same way anymore. Rather than cover them, we cleaned them by hand, tile by tile, and kept them as the floor of the finished room.
Three months, side by side
Working together, we ran the water and the power, built the bathroom from nothing, and furnished, painted and decorated the room, turning a decade-old shell into the home we'd been picturing for years. The arched window that gives the house its name, La Finestra Sul Mare, was one of the last things we cut into the old stone, framing the same stretch of sea the room had been quietly facing the whole time.