The view from this room overlooks Florence from below Fiesole. We started the project with a roman garden but it slowly changed into a morning view to the Tuscan hillside.

Lopsided

The room was very awkward as it had been a high barn built onto the south east part of the house, on one side the wall went up above six metres making everything lopsided and noisy.

The solution was to make a tent across the room as this would even things up, so a pole was made and hung from the ceiling with raw linen draped from side to side.

Misty landscape

We took many elements from roman paintings such as the trellis and birds but decided to paint a misty landscape on the two big walls, the other walls were large arched windows with views to the magnificent garden and views of hills beyond. This felt like the best way of making the transition to the outside. The room was to be used as the main entrance and an open drinks room during the summer.

Double cane

To support the tented ceiling we painted double cane supports to tie in to the real cane that ran along the lower part of the linen tent. Caterina Enni and Elena Arcangeli had the mammoth task of painting and stencilling the trellis work while I painted the Landscape and Flowers. Pietro Manzo was able to help in between teaching and all was accomplished in a month.