Built slowly, on purpose.

Lime, not cement

The original casale was built in carved limestone bound with lime mortar. We rebuilt it the same way. The new wings were finished in intonaco — the same lime-based render — rather than cement. Lime breathes; the walls release the humidity they take in, instead of trapping it. It carries far less embodied carbon than Portland cement, it weathers more gracefully, and it means that future owners will be able to repair what we built — fifty years from now — using the same materials and the same artisans.

Inside, the bathrooms in the new wing are finished in lime plaster — a natural lime polish that needs no grout and no sealant. It is one of the oldest waterproof finishes humans have. It will last longer than any membrane we could have stuck behind tiles. The mason who finished them learned the technique from his father, who learned it from his.

What we chose. What we refused.

A house is a sequence of small forks in the road. These were ours.

The numbers, honestly

Sustainability written as figures usually means a brochure. These are estimates and design targets — not certifications. We will update them with measured data once the house has been lived in through a full summer and a full winter.

Water, measured by season

The pool was sized for two families — long enough to swim, not the wide blue rectangle that has become the norm. The cover stays on at night through the hot months, when more water is lost to evaporation than to swimming. Rainwater harvesting from the flat roofs of the new wings is sized and ready; the cistern is planned for next winter. The rest of the property never needed irrigation. It never has. The macchia — wild rosemary, lentisk, fennel, thyme — drinks what the sky gives it, and asks for nothing else.

Puglia, in summer, is a region that knows the cost of water. The old farmhouses here were almost all built around a cistern carved straight into the limestone bedrock, fed by the courtyard roofs, drawn by hand. We are not reinventing this. We are catching up to it.

Travel, with eyes open

Brindisi airport is thirty-five minutes from the gate. Bari is just over an hour. Both are well served by direct flights from London, Paris, Brussels, Zurich, and the major German hubs. We do not pretend that flying is carbon-free. But the regional choice is meaningfully better than connecting through Milan or Rome, and for guests coming from northern Italy, the train to Lecce or Bari, with a short pickup at the station, is the lowest-impact route to the gate. We will help you plan it.

Once you are at the house, trips are few and short. The bakery, the butcher, the market in San Vito are a short drive away. Torre Guaceto, Carovigno, Ostuni a little farther — short enough to share, short enough to skip.

The hands that built this

The most sustainable choice we made was not a material. It was choosing local labour. The architect — Claudio Monnini — works out of Ceglie Messapica, half an hour up the road. The structural engineer drives in from Carovigno. The stonemason is from San Vito. The carpenters who made the dining table from an old workbench are from a village twelve kilometres away. The electrician's van has a phone number scrawled on the side, no website. The crew never stayed in a hotel; they went home for lunch.

None of this was decided to tick a box. It was decided because it is how you build a stone house in this part of Puglia. The supply chain is short because the supply chain has always been short. We did not have to engineer it. We just had to refuse the temptation to go elsewhere.

A house built this way is also, almost incidentally, much more repairable. When something breaks — and something always does — the person who fixes it knows the person who installed it. Sometimes they are the same person. That, too, is a kind of sustainability that does not show up on any spreadsheet.

What we are still working on

The rainwater cistern is the next item, in for winter 2026. After that: a small heat pump for shoulder-season comfort, sized to the solar capacity (in sizing). A proper compost loop with the neighbour's chicken coop (in conversation, slowly). An EV charge point at the gate (once the local grid upgrade arrives, expected 2027). We will update this page honestly as those land, with dates, and with what worked and what didn't. The site is not a brochure — it tries to keep up with the house.