From LA to Italy | Inside My Tuscan Farmhouse

Welcome to my country house in Florence. I will take you guys around and finally do a long asked for house tour. This is Leo and Romeo. They are my Italian Mani Mano sheep dogs and I would say that they're the protectors of the land but they're quite cute and cuddly if I'm honest. Come on I'll show you the inside. First things first I want to show you of course the heart of every home which is the kitchen. This is definitely where I spend most of my time as a chef and content creator and also just where I love to create and decompress and create all kinds of things in this kitchen. So I want to take you along. I'll give you the general tour. Of course this is the stove and this beautiful ancient I have no idea maybe if it was a fireplace or this is new but I love this feature and the beautiful tiles on the background. It somehow just perfectly goes with the aesthetic and the colors of Shaina's kitchen which is of course the olive oil that I produce from my land in Umbria. I have my two bottles here. This cutting board is actually a collaboration that I did with a brand called The Wooden Palette. As you can see it's super beautiful, very hearty, very heavy. This is a cutting board to last you a lifetime and I love it because it's only made from sustainable trees which means that they haven't been cut down. They have only fallen and I use this cutting board every single day of my life. I also love the rubber feet which keeps it from sliding around your countertop and of course it's beautiful so you don't ever want to put it away. This is my favorite part of the kitchen only because I spend multiple times a day with my matcha setup here, my matcha tray. I have of course my Shaina's Kitchen Morning Ritual Matcha and I love to keep this out on my countertop because I have my matcha bowl, my sifter, my whisk, all my things and of course kettle with temperature control which is essential for making a good quality matcha and a really good milk frother. These brands are Smegs. This is not a plug. I just genuinely like the brand and then of course some of my favorite mugs rather for an espresso even though I don't really drink coffee but for guests of course I want to make sure we have the cutest ones and I have as well by chance my sourdough starter. So I just fed it this morning and as you can see this is where it started and this is where it's rising. Hopefully in the next couple hours it will be four times the amount. I'm just strengthening my starter because I traveled just a week ago for a week and so you kind of have to bring it back to life and make it nice and strong before you decide to bake another bread. So this part of the kitchen I had to get kind of creative because even though this kitchen looks large and I love the high ceilings and I love the beams, I have an itty bitty tiny fridge which I have to say as an American I really miss my big double door fridges. Here I have an apartment size for a five bedroom home and another thing they don't do in these old stone houses is pantries. So I makeshifted a pantry and put great quality shelves and bought some baskets on Zara and this is now my pantry. I have to say that the baskets I try to keep them as organized as possible but it becomes very challenging because there's so many different things you buy, you use, and whatever and so once a month I try to reorganize them so that it doesn't look so messy. But I have to say that being a person who is very OCD, moving to Italy has grounded my OCD very much. So this is my version of a pantry and I don't know if this was a sink one day, must have been, not sure, but we made it something useful and beautiful and of course I love the antique archway here, I'm assuming it was a doorway. So the next little section which is the dining of the kitchen is this nice little area here to seat four. I have this beautiful painting here and then of course this very ancient fireplace which I personally am obsessed with. I love burning big fires in the house, it's something that I definitely never had as a kid growing up in the states and it just makes it so cozy in here and of course these big ceilings. So before we moved there was quite an ugly old, like I don't even know, medieval looking light fixture. We obviously brought in a little bit of a modern touch into an old country home. These are just from Zara, it just adds a little bit more of a modern touch. As I said we don't, and this this painting as well adds a bit of a modern touch to an old style feel. And I have a little cabinet here for my dishware since I don't have much cabinetry. I have another one also in the dining room which I'll show you guys which I personally love and so I just have you know my specialty mugs and other dishware in here and then this is my very large pasta board which I don't have a place to really store it either so I just store it here but this is where I make my pasta. I had it specially made specifically for making pasta like an Italianonna. Next I'm going to take you through this little hallway and show you our dining room. So the next section of my house is the dining room and of course this beautiful storage cabinet which I found here local in Florence. It's a very beautiful piece and I needed it because I brought a lot of my stuff from LA and I had a ton of dishware and plates and bowls and serving stuff because of course as a chef you could never have enough of them. So this table and chair is very simple. Mason Dumond and I think I can't remember where the chairs are from but all locally sourced here in Italy. I left my dining table still in storage in LA actually. I have still some stuff there and then bought brought some of my stuff here. So we don't use this very often. I feel like dining rooms typically are like that where they kind of are always staged but you only have them when you have dinner parties so of course especially in the wintertime when we can't be outside on the terrace we will come and have our meals here. I have my crystal babies as you can see in the corners there. This one I bought new. It's actually specific for vending off ghosts if you're into that thing. These old ancient stone houses sometimes have a lot of dense energy in them because they're so historic and so I had a little bit of a ghost situation when I first moved in here so this is to help with that. And then I have a crystal that I brought from LA which is a very beautiful rare stone which helps with creativity. So I love as you'll see on this tour I have kind of crystals all over the place in this house as I really love them and the energy of them. If you have been following me on Instagram since LA days I got this beautiful crystal for the heart of the home which was a piece in the middle of my staircase and I wanted more than anything to bring it here but if you can imagine this thing weighs like thousands of pounds and it is not easy to get it here especially the fact that we got it here and it didn't break. I'm so happy that it arrived. It is raw rose quartz with tourmaline on the top so it's a very unique combination of crystals and how it was growing on earth and I just love that it's this like chunk of rawness and of course rose quartz is the energy of love and so for the heart of the home having love and the essence of the crystal and then tourmaline is how you raid off any bad vibes so I like to have the protection of the tourmaline with of course the rose quartz of love and so this is my baby it rotates. You can get an idea of the the thickness of this guy which is pretty major. This is one of my prize things I managed to bring home from Los Angeles. Welcome to the living room. This is one of my favorite rooms in the house. It is not only of course spacious and beautiful but I love the big fireplace. This is where I actually meditate and journal every morning and just love to hang out by the fire in winter time. It's just a peaceful room. I think what makes this room really special is actually this beautiful rug. It's from a dear friend of mine who is located in Umbria. His company is called Ekaban Carpets and honestly all of my rugs in this house are from him and I just absolutely love the quality of them. It makes a big grand room like this very cozy and intimate and very stylish and I just love kind of modern touch. We got a modern couch, some modern chairs, a modern light fixture and then of course we changed this antique bookshelf into a little bit more of a modern touch as well. This was an old brown wood antique shelf that we refurbished, created these arches and then styled it of course with a little bit of more modern things to tie in the modern with the old farmhouse which you don't want to take it away with this beautiful countryside living but of course you want to have a little bit more of a not so old feel to it. Now I'm going to show you the upstairs. Come with me. This is the master bedroom. Not much to explain other than we tried to make it as cozy as possible and added some modern touches and we wouldn't usually place a bed against a window but maybe controversial topic not really sure but there's ley lines on earth and there's some that are detrimental and there's some that are beneficial and they run through the entire grid of earth and I had someone come out and test ley lines specifically especially in the bedroom and unfortunately to put the bed where it's supposed to be there's a detrimental ley line that basically goes through this part of the bed so us moving the bed here allowed us to not sleep on a ley line. Some people may think that's crazy for me it's super important because these ley lines can actually cause a lot of health detrimental things like cancer or other things because energetically it's basically messing with your system without you knowing it so anyway we managed and so we have our bed against the window not my favorite you know detail but you know again Italy humbles you in ways you don't always expect so I will let you guys view what my bedroom in detail looks like. So this is a room that I turned into a closet I am not afraid to admit that I have a lot of clothes and things that I've collected over the years although moving to Italy really made me purge a lot of stuff and rethink a lot of things about over consumerism but that being said there's only a tiny closet they don't have storage spaces really in these types of old school farmhouses so and this is just a rental so we're not gonna you know invest in any structural things so we turned one of the smallest little bedrooms into my closet and there's two you know regular storage closets over there and then I had this made from Ikea and installed so that I could actually store more of my stuff so as you can see I have my purses my shoes normal things to be hung up and then I also have to change with the season so in living in California there wasn't really seasons I didn't really change my closet out but now living in Italy I have multiple seasons so I have storage containers up top and soon I will be switching out my closet into summer clothing so this is like my little sanctuary of a closet. This is uh I guess what Americans like to call it as a bonus room but we say our tv room or whatever and half our spa room so it's one of the biggest rooms in the house and my partner Romeo took it over as his tv room and then of course I had to add in my favorite thing which is my infrared sauna so it's kind of our spa tv room we can also watch tv while we're in the sauna and it was kind of the best place we could find to put it so it's my half spa half tv room and I go in this thing at least three days a week I love it so good for detoxification um I had one in America but then when I moved here I left it in storage and so I bought another one just because it's one of those things I need as a necessity and yeah that's it this is where we hang out watch movies. Okay now I'm going to show you our outdoor area in the garden and anything else that you guys might want to see from the outside. This is my little greenhouse uh I haven't totally made it up yet because I just brought it up actually from the farm in Umbria so I could use it here but I did start a small garden inside so I will show you as I it's ready to be watered as well. Here is the outdoor terrace this is where we love to hang out of course in the nice weather in the summer and we're about to get there as you can see everything's slowly starting to bloom back because it's spring season right now and we love to host people so we have a nice seating area a nice outdoor table and a uni pizza oven and a grill around the corner which we love to grill of course and enjoy our time outside it's uh always nice to have an outdoor area especially out in nature and that's it I hope that you guys enjoyed this house tour it's a beautiful countryside Florence house and I know you guys been asking for a very long time for a house tour so I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you on the next type of tour bye guys