We first spotted the work of British designer Andrew Trotter in 2016, when we stumbled upon his newly completed Masseria Moreseta in Puglia (see A Modern Masseria in Puglia with Traditional Influences), and found ourselves obsessed (Alexa even paid a visit).

As Andrew says, “Simplicity is at the heart of my ideas as well as a true belief that any design should belong to the place where it is built.” His latest project, Casolare Scarani in Carovigno, Puglia, “has quite a sweet story,” he says. “Many years ago, a friend in Barcelona had the idea to move to Puglia. She showed me a few houses online to see what I thought about them. Maybe a year or so later, we passed a house while driving towards Carovigno, and I realized that it was one of the houses she had shown me. The house was beautiful, old, with so much character, and not too big. In the countryside you usually find small lamias, which are stone sheds for the local landowners to store equipment; or very large masserias, where the affluent landowners would have once lived. It was quite unusual to come across a building that had the style of a masseria, but the size of a small villa.

“At the time we were thinking about other projects, and we decided not to purchase it for ourselves, so when our friends and clients, the Coleman family, started to search for a house, we immediately showed them this one. Actually, we showed it to Ian, as Maree was in Australia at the time. A month later, Covid hit, but from the photos, Ian persuaded Maree, and they bought it without her seeing it. It would be more than a year later, when we had already started to renovate the property, that Maree saw the house for the first time. Luckily she fell in love with it, as we knew she would. Nine months later, Casolare Scarani was finished.”

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Photography by Salva Lopez, courtesy of Andrew Trotter Studio.