The Making Of Puglia’s Casa Soleto

For most, Puglia conjures images of orecchiette piled high into hand-painted (and often charmingly chipped) ceramic bowls, crumbling kitchens helmed by nonnas, and hidden coves with fishbowl-clear water. For others, it brings the understated yet evocative designs of Andrew Trotter to mind. Alongside his team, Andrew has carved a niche in creating spaces that feel timeless and rooted in their context. His work, particularly in Puglia, is anchored by a deep respect for tradition while offering a fresh, modern perspective on rural living. 

Drawing inspiration from the region’s vernacular architecture, Studio Andrew Trotter is known for restoring historic buildings or crafting new structures that assimilate with the landscape, often using local materials such as lime plaster and sandstone. The commonality that exists in all of their projects is a commitment to context and tradition while making space for modern comforts – creating a pared-back, seemingly undesigned feel. 

After many years of designing projects for clients in the region (perhaps most famously Masseria Moroseta), Andrew teamed up with Marcelo Martínez to purchase a 400-year-old house in a sleepy town 20 minutes south of Lecce. Casa Soleto, as it has been named, is a testament to the studio’s approach and a certain kind of lifestyle, one that embraces the slow village life of the Puglian countryside without sacrificing design or comfort. Just a handful of the properties that make up the studio’s collection are available to experience first-hand (a long weekend at Masseria Moroseta is one of the most hotly demanded reservations in Puglia), but none have ever come up for sale, until now. 

Casa Soleto looks — and feels — almost exactly like the charmingly decrepit building Andrew and Marcelo stumbled upon all those years ago, which is precisely the point. The bones of the building have been reinforced to stand the test of time, and the space that served as one Pugliese family’s home for generations has been redesigned through Andrew Trotter’s unmistakable lens. We sat down for coffee (and pasticciotto) with Andrew, to chat about the story behind Casa Soleto, from serendipitous discovery, a painstaking restoration, to a home that embodies the spirit of Puglia. 

We found the house after a long time searching online; it is a bit of a hobby of mine to look for properties. I came across this house during the first year of the pandemic. When we next visited Puglia, I really wanted to see it because it had the high ceilings and vaults typical of the area, but also a garden, which isn’t always the case with these older houses. Unfortunately, when we arrived, the estate agent said it was already reserved. I begged and begged to see it, just in case it didn’t go through, and eventually, after a lot of persuasion, he agreed. Marcelo and I just fell in love. 

At the time, it actually looked livable because all the family’s furniture was still here; the grandparents had passed away, and the family had moved on. It looked pretty much as it does now. But when you started to knock on walls, you realised you couldn’t live here as it was – things started to fall down. 

However, it just had character; a sense of something very, very special. The garden was amazing, and the outdoor spaces felt very private, despite being in the town. Luckily, two or three weeks later, the estate agent called to say it hadn’t gone through, and we quickly made an offer. It took about six months to actually buy, partly because it was during the pandemic and we couldn’t visit often. 

We wanted to keep the essence of the house. The house itself has such a strong character. What we tried to do was not make it feel too new. All the walls needed completely redoing, but we’ve used a plaster that feels appropriate. All the doors are brand new on the outside because they needed to be, but we did it in the old style and painted them by hand, so they look handmade rather than machine-made. We kept all the interior doors but had them renovated, so they work properly. 

Before, there was only one bathroom and now we’ve got five. It was about making the house livable without it feeling too perfect. A lot of people come and they renovate the old houses in such a way that they look brand new. We didn’t want this feeling. We wanted it to still feel old.  

To me, the house is very Italian, but also with touches of perhaps Belgian influence. We joke that the old lady of the house went to live in Belgium or England for 20 years, came back and she had these ideas. So it’s like a grandma’s house, but a chic grandma who knew a thing or two about style.  

Yes, we have two chapels. So we have a chapel at the back, which is the oldest one, which is probably about 400 years old. And then we have a newer one that’s now the dining room. And there’s a good story about the chapels: nobody really knows why there are two chapels in one house. One idea is that when they started to become richer or wanted to show off a little bit more, they created a new one next to the street. It was very common in the old days that you would have a little place to pray in your own house. 

We tried to keep everything in the house as old as possible. But we also realised that this is a house going to be used by us, by friends, and everybody wants to have luxuries of the modern day, even if it feels old. Nearly all of what exists in the current kitchen was here before. All of the cabinets were redone, and what was missing we made in the same style as before. We tried to keep the original character as much as possible, but everything that could be renovated, was. So we’ve got a dishwasher, a good fridge, and air conditioning in each room. 

The main thing that we wanted was a pool. So the garden isn’t huge, but we made a three-metre by two-metre pool, which can fit a good six people in. But we didn’t just want a pool for sitting in, it’s actually really quite deep, pretty much up to my neck – you can float around in it. And when it’s super hot here, it’s the best thing ever to just jump into water. 

Masseria Moroseta, my first project here, opened almost a decade ago with the boom of Puglia. And from there, our work really took off because people were coming to the hotel having seen it on the internet, and they wanted something similar. So we did six or seven new houses in a similar sort of farmhouse style to Masseria Moroseta. This taught us how the people work here, how the people are, how to talk to the mayor when you need things like electricity and they have to dig up the street to make it happen! It’s been an amazing process. 

Building here is not for the faint-hearted. Things can take a long time.  Even though the artisans here are amazing, they’re very stuck in their ways of doing things and getting them to do something that they’re not used to is a lot of pressure. We speak Italian, but I can’t imagine buying a house here when you don’t speak the language and you want to get all this done. It was about two years of work, but two years of pulling our hair out. Is it worth it in the end? Of course, because we’re very proud of what we’ve done. But I think if you can come here and buy a house that somebody else has already done, that’s the best way.

A lot of our houses in the countryside are very white, because that is typically Puglian. Here, we wanted to play, and each room is a slightly different colour, each room has a bit of a theme, and you can escape to different places. At different points in the day, you can go from one room to the other for a different experience. I’ve stayed here on my own, and I’m super comfortable, even though it’s quite a big house. I’ve been here with 10 people, and you have so much space that you can do things together or you can be off reading a book, and nobody’s disturbing you. 

Really beautiful, and this is why we like this house so much. Having the garden on one side and the patio on the other, opens the house up to a lot of light. Incredible sun comes through the back of the house in the morning, and we get the sun at the front in the afternoon. The chapel has light in the afternoon, but it has a very high window, and we put a cross on the window, so it actually makes a shadow of a cross late in the afternoon. 

We made the dining room darker, so at night with the candles, you feel like you’re in a monastery, and actually the table is from a monastery in Abruzzo, so it has this monastic feeling. In the old chapel, we made it very dark brown, so it’s the place to go when it’s hot; you can have a siesta in the afternoon. 

This is a perfect house for the summer. Puglia is great because it often has wind from the north, so it’s always a little bit fresh. But then we have a couple of weeks a year, and then a few days here and there, of what they call scirocco, which is the winds coming from Africa, where it’s crazy hot, but this house, because of the high ceilings, stays cool. Actually, I’ve never used the air conditioning downstairs – we just leave everything open and there’s a breeze that keeps it fresh.

Puglia has, over the last 10 years, just become one of the places to go. I think this is because it’s still very, very authentic. It’s very popular, but it’s actually very big. It’s a four-hour drive from the north to the south of Puglia. And they’re not letting it become too touristic. There are a few towns that have gone that way and you notice it in the quality of the food – when it becomes very touristic, the quality of the food goes down. But you can still find amazing restaurants, amazing places to go, amazing sea, amazing seafood. The vibe of the place is just incredibly authentic. That’s the real word for it. 

We used the house a lot last summer, but we also rented it out a lot too; it’s incredibly popular. This year, we’ve already got the summer pretty full of rentals. They come for two things: the beauty of the house, and to experience our studio’s work. People either commission us to make their home, or experience it for a holiday. Another good thing about this house is that each room is very different, which is great for photo shoots, which makes a nice passive income stream. Essentially, you can do both: enjoy the house and eventually have it pay for itself.

This was quite a new thing for our studio, because we were doing a lot of new builds, and a lot of our look and feel was very farmhouse, white, Mediterranean, easy going. We wanted to make this a little bit more chic, a bit more designed; but the ethos of our work is that it doesn’t feel designed, it should feel like it just belongs. So we try hard to make it feel natural.

Masseria Morosetta is one of our most famous works. I think its appeal is that it’s very photogenic, because it’s very simple, white, you’ve got the staircase in the middle, but when you go there, you feel at home. It’s small, but it’s so cosy, so easy, so relaxed, that it’s not about being somewhere to show off, it’s just that you feel good when you’re there, and I think all our work is about that. A lot of holiday homes and hotels are nice for a week, but you wouldn’t want to live here. But with this house, you could.

Home for me is strange because I think I’ve moved around so much in my life that I’ve never had a place that really feels like mine, because I just keep moving. In Barcelona, I live in my office, and actually, you can see my bed around the corner from my desk. And we’re 10 people during the daytime, so it’s sort of strange, but nice. I have this place that I share with Marcelo, and I’m doing a new place not far from Casa Solteo right now, and we go to Mexico quite often. But the one thing about this place is that it really feels like home to me. Like all my places, I just think home is somewhere you feel comfortable in, where you can stay two days without leaving, just hanging out, and where you feel so relaxed, and so peaceful, that you don’t have to do anything, or you don’t need anything. So, you can be here with a lot of friends, you can be here on your own, and it’s peaceful. 

Yes, when I started to work in Puglia, my idea was to focus on new builds. Three of our first four or five projects were new builds. But Puglia is becoming so restrictive that you can’t do anything that feels special anymore. 

Doing this place, learning about how old buildings work, and what you need to do to make them livable again, has really taught us something special, and it started a love of old buildings. We keep searching for places – whether it’s for us or for clients – because you can do some amazing things with these buildings. 

We work with a lot of artisans here who make everything by hand using traditional methods.  For instance, we decided to put a sink just inside the window of the powder room which is made out of concrete with lots of small stones in all different colours. The concrete sink is red, and the floor is designed to match; we really wanted to shock people as they walked into the bathroom. In the living room, the floor is made in the old veneziana style, which is basically poured concrete with lots of stones, polished up. When it comes to woodwork, in Northern Europe, you just don’t get this level of knowledge anymore.

We have a little garden room and it had such a beautiful aged patina on the wall already so we gave it a little green lime wash, so you could still see it underneath. And it just has a really different feeling. The room is part of the garden, so we decided to keep everything green. The paintings we found in the house also match the green paintwork in there. As we were taking off all the plaster in the courtyard, we found stone all around the doorways, so decided to leave it bare. Underneath the courtyard, we discovered a well, which is very special too. 

We really feel part of the community here. Every morning we have coffee at the local bar and chat with everybody. Our neighbour (who has since become a best friend) has brought us all sorts from her garden since the very beginning. When we first looked at the place it was full of cactus fruit as she once used it as a warehouse of sorts. We’ve done a lot of planting ourselves over the years, mostly jasmine and orange trees because I’m obsessed with the smell. We have two outdoor showers, one by the pool and one by the little courtyard at the back; showering outside is a wonderful feeling in summertime. 

One of our biggest references (generally) is Luis Barragan, as we’ve been spending a lot of time in Mexico over the last five years. His houses are strange and interesting, but when you’re in them, you feel at home. Even though he paints rooms in bright pink, it really feels like it belongs. There’s this one built-in bench painted in yellow that we both fell in love with, which we recreated here as a bit of a homage to Barragan.

Whoever buys this house will love it as much as we do. We’re not selling because we don’t like it or because we need to –  we’re just a bit obsessed with doing projects. We’re selling so we can do more things; it’s part of the game of being architects and interior designers – we just can’t stop moving. Whether it’s a family, a young couple, an old couple, or a group of friends that buy this place, they’ll have magical experiences here. 

Casa Soleto by Studio Andrew Trotter is for sale exclusively through Aucoot. Click here to see the full listing and here for our Salento area guide.