Modern Caveman - Man Builds A 230,000 House In 700-year-old Cave
THE pressures of modern life mean that most of us have probably dreamt at one time or another of fleeing to the hills. But real-life caveman Angelo Mastropietro has made his hermit dream a reality - by spending over £160,000 turning a 700-year-old cave, carved into 250 million year old sandstone cliffs in the the Wyre Forest, into his dream home. The 38-year-old, originally from Worcestershire, was living a high-flying life as the head of a successful recruitment company in Australia when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. The condition led to him being temporarily paralysed - and inspired him to seek a simpler life.
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00:00 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO My life before I became a caveman was really quite different.
00:05 COMM: The pressures of modern life mean that
00:12 most of us have probably dreamt at one time or another of fleeing to the hills.
00:17 COMM: But Angelo Mastropietro has made his
00:22 hermit dream a reality by spending over £160,000 making a house out of a cave.
00:30 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO I'm 38 years old and I'm a caveman.
00:37 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO I love a challenge and I mean I guess coincidentally
00:44 my surname actually means 'Master of the Stone', so you know maybe it's kind of in my blood.
00:51 COMM: He did most of the work himself. Even
00:53 more incredible when you consider that only a few years ago the businessman was diagnosed
00:58 with multiple sclerosis.
01:00 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO I had a lapse that left me paralysed essentially,
01:03 which was really the catalyst to make me review where I was at, where I was going and obviously
01:10 my lifestyle.
01:11 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO The rock house kind of came along and you
01:16 know without a shadow of a doubt I was as passionate about that as I was about setting
01:21 up my company.
01:22 COMM: The 250 million year old sandstone cliffs
01:27 near the Wyre Forest are said to have inspired Tolkien when he was writing 'Lord of the Rings'.
01:32 It was here that Angelo spent £62,000 on this 700 year old abandoned cave, which he
01:40 would turn into his very own hobbit hole.
01:42 With a renovation budget of £100,000, Angelo set about doing most of the physically demanding
01:49 work himself.
01:50 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO In the end I spent somewhere around about
01:54 a thousand hours basically breaking rock, cutting rock, burrowing rock. You know it
02:01 totaled somewhere around about 70 or 80 tonnes of rubble that I excavated out of this rock
02:07 house by hand and really proof of that is the hole of the terrace outside. There's
02:12 literally a hundred square metres of terrace out there. None of that was there when I started,
02:17 so that is all of the rubble that I've excavated.
02:20 COMM: The completed rock house's impressive
02:22 features are anything but stone age. It even has Wi-Fi.
02:27 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO One of the things that's kind of impressive
02:29 about the restoration is really what you don't see. We've put ventilation channels in the
02:35 floor. One of the things that I was quite passionate about doing was trying to retain
02:41 the integrity of the rock house by not cutting in any chasings in to hide wires. This would
02:48 originally have been the bedroom. These little nooks either side which I've lit up to give
02:56 the illusion of kind of light channels kind of casting light down.
03:01 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO So coming through into the shower rooms, we've
03:06 got a two-floor heating in here. One of the biggest kind of engineering feats. This is
03:13 where I'd excavated this kind of shelf and then subsequently I dug down and created this
03:20 shower.
03:21 COMM: All of the fresh running water comes from
03:23 Angelo's own borehole which he sank 80 metres into the ground.
03:27 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO These was originally two separate spaces.
03:30 So the first task was I excavated this doorway. So to start off at the top and literally cut
03:38 down, repeat the process so that the whole of the area that he was looking to remove
03:44 was set into stripes and then remove the sections of rock and just literally repeat, repeat,
03:52 repeat. Eleven days later, he kind of made my way through.
03:58 COMM: Although the cave house was originally
04:07 built as a holiday net, Angelo still harbours the ambition of one day living full time in
04:13 his unusual property.
04:15 ANGELO MASTROPIETRO When you're actually here and you see it
04:19 in person, you get a feel for the place. I literally had people in tears. You know, I
04:25 feel incredibly happy, very proud, very honoured. It's been a very inspiring chapter I think.
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