Friedl’s old Stuben

Tradition and creativity: Friedl Trocker has plenty to do restoring his old Stuben.

Friedl’s old Stuben Skilled carpenter Friedl Trocker specialises in restoring old Stuben, South Tyrol’s traditional wood-panelled rooms.

Hardly anyone knows more about the subject than he does.

I

n the space above Friedl’s workshop are stacked well over one hundred old wooden doors, many weathered with peeling paint and finely carved decoration. The previous owner wanted to get rid of these unsightly things when she was rebuilding her house. Friedl was happy to take them off her hands, as his skill lies in restoring the former dignity and beauty of these old objects.

He acquired the tools of his trade at a tender age from a local cabinet-maker. His love for old, natural wood, for traditional working methods and authentic originality developed gradually over the years. Finally, he decided to set up a workshop in the family home, the Färberhof farm above Siusi, and himself to become a master with the focus on restoring old wooden fittings and Stuben.

“I’ve restored as many as fourteen Stuben a year”, he says. Today, following a serious accident at work, his output has declined somewhat, but his passion for the Stuben remains. It is abundantly clear from his stories: he knows all about their local characteristics, their history over the centuries, their construction methods.

Text: Rosa Maria Erlacher photo: Helmuth Rier

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Warm living quarters. “Even in very old farmhouses the Stube was the cosiest room in the house, the meeting place for the very often large families and their servants, where they ate and prayed together, with grandparents, parents and children alternating by the warm stove, the women

spinning and sewing, the men weaving baskets or mending farming equipment in winter”, he says.

The Stube was the only room that was heated in winter, with a whitewashed round oven made of firebrick or natural stone, lit from beneath and giving off a constant heat. “That was why a door always led directly from the Stube into the parents’ bedroom”, Friedl explains. It was left open in winter so that the nights were not too cold for the infants and young children.

Each farmhouse stove also had to have an “oven bridge” and a round bench. The so-called bridge was a wooden, four-legged construction above or around the oven, with a square flat surface area “made of the thinnest possible wooden boards to improve comfort”, with a head-rest and struts around the stove that served for climbing up as well as for a makeshift laundry stand.

To further protect the living quarters against the cold outside, the interior was completely panelled with wooden boards on all four walls as well as on the ceiling. “Yet there is a high mountain valley here in South Tyrol where none of the Stube have pa­nelling on the ceilings. There’s no shortage of wood up there, so that was not the reason; it might have been because the local carpenters simply lacked the necessary skills”, Friedl muses.

But where the Stuben makers enjoy a long tradition, the ceilings are especially fine, either as panelled ceilings or as carved wood-beamed ceilings.

These peasant joiners were quite advanced in »

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their techniques, as Friedl has discovered when removing old Stuben. Before 1870 the wooden panels were nailed in place, he says: since then only the tongue and groove method is in use.

Restoring a Stube. While in the past ma­ king a Stube was a lengthy process, requiring a full winter’s work, today there are numerous time and energy-saving tools available to modern joiners. “Before I dismantle a Stube, I number each part and photograph the structure”, he says.

He then steam-cleans the boards, planes them flat, brushes them, strips gilded wood panelling with a carefully prepared solution, then dries it all with a hairdryer.

“It was for a time the fashion just to paint over the panelling with oil paint, perhaps for hygienic reasons in particular, because it made the Stube easier to clean”, explains Friedl.

And after all that... “After all that comes the creative part”. It is a challenge to fit an old Stube in between new walls. This is because Stuben were practically never built at right angles, while ceiling heights were generally lower, floorboards became thin with wear on both sides and often mouldy from the skirting board up. And, because people in those days were shorter than today, tables, chairs and benches had shorter legs too. But for Friedl this is absolutely no problem: his art is to make every old Stube appear as if it has been newly fitted in place. You have to look carefully to notice his “new” additions with the naked eye.

Just exactly how he manages to do this remains his little secret. The means to this end, however, are patently obvious when you look around his workshop. There is a plethora of old boards and pegs, mostly of spruce and Swiss pine, a few made of larch, which he uses as needs be. He finds a rich source of material on old farms, where the urge to modernise means that the owners are only too glad to be rid of the old. Friedl regards this as a shame and strives to preserve such objects: quite right too! «

The old Stuben, fully restored, give off an aura of tranquillity.

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