“When I met my husband John, we were both working at an advertising agency in London. After we got married and had our twin boys, we started dreaming about what we truly wanted to do and where we would like to live.
Fed up with the stress of London life, we both became very interested in holistic health. John studied shamanism and Chi Kung and I retrained as a breath therapist, hypnotherapist and Qi Gong specialist, working with individuals and group practices.0
It was then that we began making serious plans to set up a retreat centre in Italy. I was born and grew up there, so for me it felt like a bit of a homecoming. John was even more excited than me – he couldn’t wait to move to a slower-paced, warm, tiramisu-making country.
We made things happen quite quickly. When the boys were eight months old, we rented out our Victorian flat in Tooting Bec, bought a big campervan and set off to Italy to find a property for our retreat. It was a real challenge: we spent eight months living in the campervan with baby twins. They weren’t walking and we had to take them everywhere we went, all while looking at properties and planning work on the location we chose. I was washing tons of clothes at each campsite we stayed at. But, when you’re working towards a dream, you just get on with it. One thing is for sure; we’ll never forget that mad time.
Luckily, we found our ideal property in one of the first areas we considered – Le Marche, on the East coast of central Italy. I knew the region quite well, as my mum had a holiday home nearby when we were growing up.
What impressed us was how beautiful, wild and secret it felt – quite untouched and distanced from the tourist trail. It is as beautiful as Tuscany but not as well known. As we explored the areas around Urbino, we immediately got the feeling we were in the right place.
Read the full article in our August 2009 issue.
