The Shower Was Never Really About The Shower

This is a series. Below is the fourth part of how I built and bought the Principe. Read the first here, don’t miss the second here. Here is the third.

Guests come to Principe and fall a little bit in love.

With the sea, with the light, the island, the project, with the particular feeling of being somewhere that seems to have figured something out that the rest of the world hasn’t quite managed yet. And somewhere between the aperitivo and the third night’s dinner, the conversation turns — it always does — to the same question:

How did you do this? I want to do this.

I smile. I tell them the truth. I say: come. Spend two or three months here first. Work alongside us. See what this actually is before you decide.

Nobody takes me up on it.

They go home, they open Google, they start researching. They make spreadsheets. They read articles. They talk to banks. They do everything a sensible person does when they are about to do something slightly insane — they try to prepare. They try to know, in advance, what they are walking into.

I understand this completely. I also did it. And I still rebuilt my showers three times.

Year one: I kept the original bathrooms but replaced the shower cabins. Seventy centimetre cubicles with a curtain. I could not in good conscience ask guests to spend a summer in them. Out they went. Crystal showers in.

Year two: I redid the bathrooms properly. New everything. Including new showers. The crystal ones — gone.

Year three: I discovered that cement floors and shower water are not friends. The floors were leaking. The showers came out again.

Three times. Three budgets. Three moments of standing in a half-demolished bathroom thinking: if I had just thought this through properly the first time.

This is what happens when you are solving the immediate problem instead of the strategic one. When the budget is tight and the season is coming and you need a decision by Thursday and you make one — not the right one, but one — because something is always better than nothing and you will fix the rest later.

Later always comes. Usually with a bill attached.

I should mention — I have a thing about showers. Standards, let’s call them. I think it comes from years spent swimming in public pools. I can shower outside, I can shower cold, I have done both. But I have standards. Which makes it particularly ironic that I spent three years getting the showers wrong.

In business we treat mistakes as failure. As evidence of insufficient preparation. The whole apparatus of business planning exists to answer one question: how do we avoid getting this wrong?

I believe in making the homework. There are things I wish I had known before I started — not the vision, not the brand, not who the guests should be — but the details. The practicality. The way hotel showers age differently from home showers. The way a guest uses a room versus the way an owner imagines a guest using it. The thousand small operational things that no mood board or business plan can actually teach you.

This is why I tell people: come first. Try it. Put yourself inside someone else’s version before you build your own.

But here is what I have also learned, after years of no fixed address:

Some mistakes cannot be prepared for. And some of the ones that hurt the most are the ones that build you the most.

When I opened Principe I did not stop to think about where I would sleep. I was so consumed by the hotel — the rooms, the guests, the staff, the showers, the pendant lights, the vision that only I could see — that I simply forgot to sort out my own life.

For three years I was a gypsy. Sleeping in whichever room was free that night, then another when that one got sold. In year two I rented a house in Leni, near the cemetery, no internet — perfect place to recharge, I told myself. Except the shower was wrong and I was too far from the business and I kept coming back after dinner and never quite arriving home. A home with no care is just a room. I started dreading going back. Eventually I called the owner, paid everything I owed, and left for good.

I put a bed in the storage room at Principe. Slept there when I wasn’t at my parents’ house. My mother has always been able to create a home wherever she is — that is her particular genius. I was building a home for everyone else and had completely forgotten to build one for myself.

The storage room was fine. But I couldn’t switch off inside Principe. It was consuming me and I couldn’t rest inside the thing that was consuming me, even though I loved it completely. I was tired in a way that went deeper than sleep. Snappy with my staff. Not the boss I wanted to be. Lonely in the middle of a full house, surrounded by people who saw the success and had no idea what it was taking.

In year four I finally bought a house. Two hundred metres from Principe. A ruin, essentially — needing everything, offering nothing except walls and a garden and an outdoor shower that ran cold. Zisou (my cat) came too. The garden wasn’t properly enclosed so I spent half my time monitoring him. The shower was freezing. The house was a construction site.

I felt at home.

For the first time in four years I could breathe. Not because it was comfortable — it wasn’t — but because it was mine. Imperfect and unfinished and completely mine. We renovated it the following year. Filippo came. It became home properly, the way things become home when someone you love is also in them.

But that first year — the cold shower, the open garden, the cat I was constantly watching — that was when I understood something I could not have understood any other way:

You cannot prepare yourself for what you actually need. You can only live without it long enough to know.

My grandfather Mario, in his nineties, used to recall his life in fragments. The memories that kept returning were not the comfortable ones. They were the Fridays when my father picked him up and they drove to Corsica to paint the new house — twelve hours a day, no breaks, an apple for lunch. Two men who did not know how to do anything halfway.

He remembered those weekends as some of the best of his life.

We are not beginnings. We are continuations.

I come from a family of people who find happiness in the project. Who understand that the building of something is not the sacrifice you make before the joy — it is the joy. This is in my DNA. I recognised it in myself only after years of sleeping in the wrong beds.

So here is what I think about mistakes, having rebuilt the same shower three times and come out the other side:

In business — avoid the ones you can. Prepare. Try it first. Spend three months inside someone else’s version before you build your own. The practical mistakes are expensive and avoidable and not particularly interesting in retrospect.

But in life?

The mistakes are the material. They are not the thing that happens before you become yourself. They are how you become yourself. The four years of no home taught me that I need one — really need one — in a way I couldn’t have known before. The cold outdoor shower in a house that wasn’t finished yet taught me what home actually feels like when you finally find it.

You cannot Google your way to this. You cannot prepare for it. You can only live it, rebuild it when it leaks, and trust — the way my grandfather trusted, the way I am slowly learning to trust — that the memory you carry from the other side will be worth every hour of the work.

Con affetto,
Anita

P.S. The showers at Principe are perfect now. I think. I hope.
P.P.S. If you want to open a hotel on an island — come. Spend three months with us first. I will try to teach you everything I know. And then you can invite me to yours when it opens. That is the deal.
P.P.P.S. Zisou is fine. The garden is now enclosed.

Principe di Salina is where these letters come from — a boutique hotel on a volcanic island in Sicily with fourteen rooms, an infinity pool, lots of pasta and a sea that changes colour every hour. Margaritas are good too.

My hotel? Click to see the Principe