Inside one couple’s $2-million renovation of an 18th-century Italian farmhouse

In 2022, Alper Ozdemir, a 55-year-old former operations executive, and Cynthia Liu, a 57-year-old former financial engineer, bought an abandoned 18th-century farmhouse in the southern Italian region of Puglia for $333,550. In 2024, they told Toronto Life about their plans for a $1.2-million restoration of the property. Two years (and about $2 million) later, the renovations are complete, and they’ve transformed the 3,500-square-foot stone building into an elegant, self-sufficient three-bedroom home surrounded by a bucolic Mediterranean garden and an infinity pool. Both retired, they live in the farmhouse year-round, but they occasionally rent it out when they’re travelling around Europe. Here, they tell us about life in the Italian countryside.

Alper: We moved in on May 1 of last year.

Cynthia: Originally, we expected the restorations to be completed by summer of 2024, but they ended up taking a lot longer.

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Alper: Renovations are never easy—we’ve done several in Canada—but here, it’s on a different level of difficulty. The word renovation doesn’t even fully exist in Italian.

Cynthia: As we learned in this process, restorations are a moving target in Italy. The rules will change suddenly, without any notification, and their meaning is totally up for interpretation. Our initial plan relied on a rule called piano casa, which let us convert non-residential spaces like barns and expand the square footage by 20 per cent. But that rule was terminated before we could submit our design, and it took three years for the government to write the new policy.

Alper: The bureaucracy in Italy is legendary. And we chose to follow the principles of restoration, meaning we were maintaining the original form as much as possible. We reused stones from the property, for example, which were removed and cleaned by hand.

Cynthia: We also ended up having to change the builder, which further delayed the process. We’re lucky to have finished at all—I’ve seen people buy properties and have to abandon the whole thing because their plans couldn’t be realized. You may have this romantic idea of restoring an old farmhouse in Italy, bringing an old building back to life, but the reality is not as fun.

Alper: We tell our friends, “If you want to live in Italy, don’t try to renovate. Just buy something completed and ready to enjoy.”

Cynthia: All that said, we’re very happy with the way this turned out. It has everything we wanted. First, we wanted to be more sustainable, so we use solar energy.

Alper: We have 24 solar panels plus a 20-kilowatt battery. On a sunny day, the solar panels are enough to maintain the house—and in Puglia, 300 days of the year are sunny. The hot water is also solar-powered. And we have an under-floor heating system throughout the whole house.

Cynthia: Outside, we planted a drought-tolerant garden with more than 1,200 plants. We engaged an award-winning garden design company, Studio Paz. We’re lucky because the previous owner of the house is an organic farmer, so he still comes to maintain the land and plant hay for his cows.

Alper: His name is Giuseppe; he’s a lovely man. We have a gentleman’s agreement, a simple handshake: he gets hay for his cows, and he gives us olive oil and homemade cheese.

Cynthia: The garden is irrigated using a rainwater-collection system. We’re trying to make sure nothing is wasted. Among the local plants, there’s wild asparagus, chicory and a type of edible flower called Italian wasabi that we use as a garnish on seafood and sushi.

Alper: Wild arugula is everywhere too, and the taste is something else.

Cynthia: The climate offers a different quality of life here. We can have fresh-squeezed organic orange juice every day because oranges cost only 60 cents a pound. You can get fresh produce and seafood year-round. It would be hard to find fish in Toronto that’s as fresh as in Puglia.

Alper: We also have a lot of fruit trees on our land. There are cherry trees, almond trees, a rare wild white mulberry and an apricot tree by the entrance that’s in full bloom right now.

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Cynthia: We harvest all of them. The best are the fig trees. Everybody has one here. In the morning, the figs are warm from the sun. You eat them right off the branch, if you don’t mind your fingers getting sticky.

Alper: It’s amazing how much one tree can give.

Cynthia: Just today, our neighbour gave us a big bowl of this lemon-orange-cross fruit.

Alper: Most of our neighbours are Italian, so we’re learning the language. We take private classes three times a week.

Cynthia: Now, our Italian is good enough that we can carry on a conversation through an entire meal. Italian lunches and dinners are five-or-six-hour events.

Alper: We’re still not totally fluent, obviously, but I think Italians appreciate that we’re making an effort. They compliment us on our Italian. It’s night and day from when we first moved here. We can even crack jokes. I’ve learned to say, “Are you kidding me?!”

Cynthia: If you’re not from Italy, I’m not sure if you can ever become a “local.” It has a very distinct culture, and for us, Canada does still feel like home. But the locals have accepted us as a permanent part of the community. Recently, we were away, and one of our neighbours called us to ask if he could prune our cherry trees. After he pruned them, he grafted another cherry species onto one of the trees, just for the sake of sharing.

Alper: There’s a distinct community feel here. In Puglia, if a friend is driving and sees you on the sidewalk, they’ll stop traffic to roll down the window and talk to you. People in restaurants and bars will remember your name and order even months later. There’s no such thing as a quick stop at the butcher, because you’re going to spend 15 minutes chit-chatting before you order.

Still, there’s a lot to miss about Toronto. Sometimes I just want to buy a cup of coffee and walk down the street, but they don’t do to-go coffee here. Italian coffee is great, but you’re supposed to sit and enjoy it. And as much as Italian food is good, you don’t get variety like you do in Toronto, which is one of very few cities in the world where everybody is from everywhere.

Cynthia: We’re visiting Toronto in the summer, and I’m sure we’ll miss Italy. That’s what life is, right? When you’re over there, you miss here, and when you’re here, you miss over there.

Alper: When you’ve lived in Toronto for 30-odd years, you have your qualms—the traffic, the snow. But there’s truly nowhere else like it.

Cynthia: Although Puglia is not as diverse as Toronto, it’s easy to travel. You can get to pretty much anywhere in Europe within two hours.

Alper: We are maybe 55 minutes from the airport, and you can get through security in about five minutes—very different from Pearson.

Cynthia: And tickets can cost as low as 20 or 30 euros. So why not just hop on a flight to Paris or London?

Alper: There’s also a good railway network in Italy. We just came back from northern Italy. We were in Torino, near Milan, for a week, and then we took a train to Bologna because there was a wine festival. So you get a mix of country living plus access to European cities.

Cynthia: We travel a good 10 days a month. When we’re not here, the house is empty, so we thought we might as well share it. We’ve started a rental business and take bookings on all the usual platforms, with a property manager to handle the logistics when we’re out of town

Alper: We didn’t build this to be a hotel—this is our home—but our hope is that, when guests stay here, it becomes like their house too.

Cynthia: When our friends come to visit, they want to know what it’s like to actually live here. So we figured guests would want the same. We started offering information on how to enjoy the beauty of Puglia more like a local. We thought we could offer something different from a rushed checklist of destinations with a tour guide.

Alper: We have discovered so many places that hardly any tourists go or that the locals maybe take for granted. There’s Noci, a small city with incredible food and restaurants. The meat is exceptional there because all the animals graze in open fields and eat wild herbs and plants.

Cynthia: There’s also the historic town of Martina Franca. It was a tax-free zone back in the day, which fuelled the town’s wealth, so it has many old palazzos and one of the largest cathedrals in Italy. The town has only 45,000 people, but it runs a world-famous summer opera festival.

Alper: Then there’s Torre Canne, a small coastal town where locals rent vacation homes in the summer. It’s full of seafood restaurants, and there are hardly any tourists. It borders the Coastal Dunes Regional Park, where you can walk for miles on sandy beaches.

Cynthia: The landscape in Puglia is so unique, with its rolling hills and forests so close to the beaches and the seaside. Our friends are often shocked at how green it is. It’s worth exploring.

Alper: But, even if you don’t want to explore, the farmhouse is the perfect place to just relax in nature. The first morning we moved in, Cynthia and I woke up at 5 a.m. and went up to the terrace to watch the sunrise.

Cynthia: It was this amazing sunrise of pinks and oranges and purples. The position of the house is perfect because, on one side, you see the sunrise, and on the other side, you see the sunset.

Alper: It wasn’t a straight journey to get to that point—more of a years-long zigzag—but it was worth it to see that sunrise. I get goosebumps now just thinking about it. It was this feeling of, Finally, we are here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.