An olive tree at the heart of a house
When Claudio Monnini drew the first sketch of Casa Andrea in August 2022, he placed one centenary olive at the very centre of the courtyard. Every line of the project — the two new wings, the pool, the steps — was bent around that one tree.
The first time we walked Claudio Monnini around the property in the summer of 2022, we showed him the casale and the boundaries and the slope down to where the pool might eventually go. He looked at all of it politely. Then he stopped at an olive tree in the middle of the field — not particularly large, not particularly old by Pugliese standards, maybe a hundred and fifty years — and he stayed there for some time. When we asked what he was thinking, he said: this one stays where it is. We build around it.
Two months later, the August 2022 sketch arrived. The courtyard he had drawn was not a rectangle with a tree decoratively placed inside. It was a tree with a house built around it. The casale was on one side. A new wing with the bedrooms on another. A two-storey volume with the salon and the rooftop office across the courtyard. The pool below, reached by steps that cut down the slope. And in the middle of it all, in a round bed of bare earth ringed by a low stone curb, the olive.
What it changes, when the tree comes first
If you start with a building plan and add trees later, your trees end up at the edges. They are landscape — useful for shade, for privacy, for the picture. They are not structural to the experience of the place.
If you start with the tree and build to it, three things happen.
First, every room looks at the same thing. The dining room window in the casale frames the olive from one side. The arched doorways of the sleeping wing frame it from the opposite side. The salon's long arches open onto it. Even the rooftop office, two floors up, looks down at it. Wherever you are in the house, the same tree is in your view. It becomes the thing that makes the place coherent — not the architecture.
Second, the volumes are forced to be modest. A tree that's older than your wall has a particular effect on the design conversation: you cannot legitimately propose anything that would dwarf it. The new wings at Casa Andrea are deliberately short — one storey on the bedroom side, two on the salon side, but the upper one (the office) is a single small volume on a flat roof, more of a perch than a floor. The tree, full-canopy, is taller than the office.
Third, the construction logic has to flex. We had to dig the pool by hand within ten metres of the tree's root mass. We had to route the foundations of the new wings to avoid lateral roots that we mapped before pouring concrete. We had to commit, in writing with our builder, that if a major root needed to be cut to save the project, the project would be replanned. None ever did, but the commitment shaped how carefully the excavator was used near the trunk.
A tree that's older than your wall has a particular effect on the design conversation: you cannot legitimately propose anything that would dwarf it.
What it costs, and what it returns
Building around a single tree costs you, in concrete terms, about three months on the construction timeline and probably ten per cent on the budget. The hand-dig near the roots is slower than machine work. The plumbing for the pool has to route around the tree's water uptake zone. The courtyard surfacing has to be permeable enough not to suffocate the roots, which rules out the cheapest options.
What it gives back is harder to put on a spreadsheet but easier to see in person. Every guest who arrives at Casa Andrea now will arrive into the shadow of an olive that was there before their grandparents were born. The courtyard does not feel like an architectural achievement. It feels like a place that has always been like this — only with the conveniences added. That is, in our experience, the highest thing a piece of contemporary architecture can aim for in a place like Puglia: not to look new at all.
A note on the architect
Claudio Monnini's signature is in the corner of every rendering of Casa Andrea. He came down from Bari, asked us what we wanted, listened to two rounds of answers, made one sketch, then one watercolour, then refused to change anything substantial. The result is a house that does almost exactly what he drew in April 2023. We are very lucky.