Casa Caroseno

Casa Caroseno sits in the Puglian countryside between Castellana Grotte and Conversano, in the Valle d'Itria, among cherry orchards and wheat fields. This is limestone country, honey-coloured towns, dry-stone walls and karst caves, close to the trullo villages the region is known for. Castellana Grotte has one of Italy's deepest cave systems, Conversano and Putignano carry centuries of medieval and baroque building, and the coast, Monopoli and the harbour town of Polignano a Mare, is half an hour away.

The house was built in the late 1950s by the family's grandparents, a simple rest house for after long days working the fields, which later became their summer home. It was restored by Opus Atelier, a Milan and Bari-based studio founded in 2019 by architects Maura Pinto and Piervito Pirulli, who added a porticoed entrance, a typical feature of Puglian buildings that creates a threshold between inside and out, and built a new separate volume alongside the original tufo-stone house. The garden, laid out by Studio Paz around the old stone walls, changes with the seasons through native trees, and the pool sits within it. Inside, plastered walls, arched openings and soft, muted tones keep the mood calm: one king bedroom, one open room with a double bed or two singles and its own kitchen, two bathrooms, and a living room built around a sculptural fireplace. The family's own restaurant, Osteria Caroseno, is a seven-minute drive away.