Apartments In Italy: Two men and an architect from Florence have turned an olive oil factory into 30 apartments near a hill town in Tuscany. Frances O'Rourke reports.
Do you believe in God, asks Franco, as I shovel pasta with truffles into my mouth. I mumble something non-committal, unaccustomed to conversations with property developers taking a theological turn.
"We don't," says Francesco, his business partner in a venture which has turned an olive oil factory into 30 luxury holiday apartments in a quiet townland in Tuscany.
We are sitting in a restaurant on a terrace overlooking the main square of Cortona, a medium-sized hill town still buzzing with visitors at the end of September.
It's 28 degrees, sunny and warm, but still cool enough to enjoy a quick tour of the town before heading back to look at Antica Cortona, their development a few kilometres out of town.
I think God crept into the conversation when we were discussing the sights to see in Cortona: chief among them is The Annunciation, two panels by Fra Angelico in the town's diocesan museum. Franco sits in the sun, refusing anything to do with church matters, while Francesco brings me to look at the painting, a brilliant work still glowing after 600 years.
Francesco Marri and Franco Camici are two hyperactive seventysomethings who clearly haven't heard much about the word "retirement". Camici, a tea importer from Livorno, on the coast near Pisa, and Marri, formerly a banker there, became business partners when the latter decided about four years ago to turn his family's olive oil factory/granary into apartments.
The Cloisters - called that because of the arched cloisters on either side of the courtyard inside the brick red-roofed building - was owned by the Marri family for generations, and was always built like that. Francesco doesn't know if it was once a monastery.
It's in what we might call a townland, just a short drive off a main road: it looks idyllic, a setting from a romantic movie (Indeed, Under the Tuscan Sun, based on Frances Mayes's books, was filmed up the road in Cortona, where the American writer still lives.)
A listed early Christian church, S Michele Arcangelo, built on the site of a pre-Christian temple of Bacchus, stands next to The Cloisters. There are also a handful of houses beside the development and several handsome Tuscan villas glimpsed through large iron gates at the end of cypress-lined driveways.
Everything is peaceful, quiet, the only movement a handful of cars driving up to view the church, a national heritage site. In the large garden of the development, there's a quiet splash from the swimming pool, where some early buyers - an Irish couple - are whiling away the afternoon.
From the outside, The Cloisters looks exactly as it did before being converted: Italian planning laws dictate that the exteriors of historic buildings like this should be left completely untouched, and they are apparently ruthless in enforcing the laws. This causes headaches for property developers - Franco and Francesco sigh a little wearily when you ask them about it - but it certainly means that The Cloisters looks authentically old.
The Florentine architect brought in to redesign the factory has done an excellent job of combining an authentic rural Tuscan look with high spec modern luxury. He's also managed to get a surprisingly large number of apartments, all of a good size, into a space that doesn't initially look as if it could accommodate them.
Massimo Marri, Francesco's son and manager of the development, shows me around. The one and two-bedroom apartments, costing from an average of around €220,000 to €335,000, vary in size and design but all have terracotta-tiled floors, beamed ceilings, most have working fireplaces and those already fitted out have elegant, modern kitchens and bathrooms.
Six have small gardens outside, and one has a large private terraced balcony overlooking the internal courtyard.
Sizes are generous, ranging from around 50sq m (538sq ft) for one-beds to the largest, a two-bed, that's 97.42sq m (1,046sq ft). (One small 39sq m (409sq ft) unit is available for €171,000.) Many of the one-beds would comfortably accommodate four people, if you are happy to use sofa beds.
Two of the apartments could be merged and sold as one very large unit, says Massimo.
The apartments come unfurnished, but the developers will help buyers to fit them out. All come with heating, air conditioning, parking in a communal car-park, and all have access to the swimming pool and large garden. There are plans to equip one corner of it as a barbecue area.
Annual maintenance charges have not yet been fixed, but are likely to range from €70 to €140 per month; annual tax ranges from €198 a year to €385 for the largest apartment. Mortgages of about 50 per cent of the purchase price can be arranged in Italy.
People buying for investment, or who want to rent to help defray expenses, can expect reasonable returns: Franco and Francesco estimate that about 60 per cent of the apartments could expect rentals for between 35 and 50 weeks a year. Rentals would range from around €400 to €750 a week for one-beds from low to high season and from €550 to €1,000 a week for two-beds. Franco also says that capital values in the area have grown by about 8 to 10 per cent per year in recent years.
Cortona, with its lively bars and restaurants, is about 5kms away by the main road, a vigorous 2.5kms uphill by a back road. Il Chiostro is about equidistant from Pisa and Rome, roughly a two to three-hour drive.
Antica Cortona - Il Chiostro - is for sale through Gunne New Homes Overseas
