We didn’t have ownership yet.
We didn’t have a plan.
We didn’t have a budget.
But we had time — and access to the land.
So we started anyway.
A Simple Rule
Very early on, we made a decision:
We would not buy anything.
No new materials.
No heavy tools.
No shortcuts.
Only:
- what we could find on the land
- what we could carry
- what we had in the garage
The First Promise
The first thing we built was a swing.
We had promised our daughter.
It wasn’t perfect. It took time. We adjusted, rebuilt, tested again.
But it worked.
And that was enough.
Creating a Place to Stay
From there, things evolved naturally.
We built:
- a hanging couch
- a simple chair
- a small pergola
All from branches, leftover wood, and whatever we could reuse.
No design.
No blueprint.
Just intuition.
Finding Our Spot
There was one place that quickly became special.
At the edge of the plateau.
A natural opening in the landscape, overlooking endless vineyards and distant hills.
That’s where we installed the hanging couch.
Not to build something impressive —
but to create a place to sit.
To pause.
To watch.
A Different Way of Building
This wasn’t construction.
It was something slower.
More deliberate.
We weren’t transforming the land —
we were learning from it.
Every branch, every piece of wood forced us to adapt.
Nothing was standard. Everything was imperfect.
And that’s exactly what made it feel right.
👉 In the next post, we move from building to shaping the land — clearing trees, managing risk, and creating the first space for biodiversity:
Clearing the Land & Creating Biodiversity →
← Previous step:
Before It Was Ours
← Start from the beginning:
The Day Everything Began
