By Carolyn Barnes
Town Crier Correspondent
Business Profile
Valentina Cirasola of Trullo Interiors loves tile and stone. Italian-born and educated, she has specialized in interior design and remodeling on the Peninsula for five years, after owning a similar business in Italy.
“I hire a lot of Italian contractors, because we understand the same things and speak the same language. We are stone lovers; it is said we caress our stones,” Cirasola said.
She is currently redesigning a Mediterranean-style home in Palo Alto, where she has just installed a new patio featuring a terra cotta tile floor inset with random decorative tiles.
“I also designed stucco benches inset with decorative tile in the same way. One seat is shaped like a funnel and completely decorated with 1-inch-by-1- inch Mexican tiles,” Cirasola said.
Another favorite material is concrete.
“I love concrete!” she said. “It isn’t a dead material at all. It can come alive just like stone. Sometimes I inset objects like coins, marbles, glass, or old plates in it, or stamp it into a pattern like stone. You can color it now, and when it is sealed, it looks like stone, but is easier to care for.”
Her special talent is featuring rustic, traditional building materials within a modern setting. A display of her beautiful watercolor renderings of design projects illustrates her ongoing transformation of a country spa in the Carmel Valley into an upscale, Mediterranean hideaway. Here she has designed and supervised the installation of sculptured stucco garden walls, a formal courtyard fountain and practical, yet elegant individual treatment enclosures, each with its own pool, fountain and garden. Within an existing building footprint, she is creating an indoor-outdoor headquarters building with an office, locker rooms and more treatment rooms.
“I form an overall vision of a project and coordinate all the things necessary to achieve that vision,” Cirasola said.
Often a client will hire her for what seems to be a small assignment, like choosing the colors of paint for a home’s exterior and interiors. But then one project leads to another, and soon she has transformed the entry, rebuilt the garden wall and even redesigned the garden, if necessary.
“I generally work on an hourly basis, but if the project is large, my fee is a percentage of the whole,” Cirasola said. “My motto is, ‘No job is too big or too small,’ and I also do the staging of homes and redesign kitchens and baths. And I love designing new lighting plans.”
Recent Peninsula clients have contacted Cirasola because of her unusual display ad in local newspapers, showing a drawing (by Cirasola, who is a serious artist, as well as a designer) of a cone-shaped cottage adorned with pottery urns and stone columns.
“That little building is called a trullo, which is the word for a special kind of medieval dwelling, converted from a farm storage building,” Cirasola said. “I was a member of the architectural team that restored all of the trulli (plural form of trullo) in the village of Alberobello in Puglia, which is now a protected UNESCO cultural site.”
Even though her husband’s career brought her to the United States soon after that project, the couple purchased a trullo in Alberobello for themselves.
It might seem like quite a leap from a vacation house on the Adriatic - where Cirasola installed stone floors bordered in black and white mosaic tiles - and a home in Montara on the San Mateo County coast, where she is selecting the interior color scheme and redoing the garden. But the adaptable designer, who speaks four languages, finds both locations similar.
“The clients want to enjoy their views and have plenty of air and sun; those are the ideas I started with in both places,” she said.
Trullo Interiors, owned by Valentina Cirasola, can be contacted by calling (408) 732-9782.
