Studio Andrew Trotter Trades Puglia's White Vaults for a Pink Limestone Villa in Carovigno

For years, Studio Andrew Trotter has been synonymous with the whitewashed, barrel-vaulted houses of Puglia, projects that sit quietly in olive groves and photograph like they've always been there. Casa Maiora, completed in 2022 in Carovigno, is a deliberate break from that lineage. The walls are not white but a soft, powdery pink, made from lime wash mixed by a local artisan using methods that predate the studio by centuries. The vaults are gone too, replaced by flat timber ceilings with exposed joists and thick cane coverings. It is not a rejection of regional building so much as a pivot to a different chapter of it: the coastal villa with a colonnaded veranda, oriented to catch both sea views and the low arc of winter sun.

What makes the project worth studying is the discipline of its material palette. The house is built from tufo, a local sandstone that arrives in shades of yellow and green, then wrapped in that distinctive pink lime wash inside and out. Floors are cut from the same limestone family. Wet rooms use cocciopesto, a waterproof plaster technique the Romans favored. A bespoke terrazzo countertop anchors the kitchen. Every surface is mineral, local, and hand-finished. The result is a four-bedroom house that functions as both a family home and a rental property, yet reads as neither generic holiday villa nor self-conscious design statement. It simply reads as Puglian, in a register most visitors haven't encountered.

Siting and the Logic of Elevation

The house is placed at the southern edge of its elevated lot, a position that exploits the site's natural drop to open views north and south toward the Adriatic. From a distance, the layered volumes of pink stucco and dry stone retaining walls step down the terrain like geological strata, making it hard to tell where architecture ends and landscape begins. This is intentional: gabion walls and local stone terracing blur the boundary, and olive groves press in on every side.

Orienting the plan east-west means each room gets generous sun throughout the day, reducing reliance on mechanical heating in cooler months. In summer, the thick cane covering over the veranda filters direct overhead light into stripes, keeping the colonnade cool without sealing it off from the breeze. It is passive design achieved through vernacular means, not high-tech glazing assemblies.

The Colonnade and Outdoor Rooms

The covered corridor is probably the single best space in the house. Timber beams carry a dense layer of cane that throws parallel shadow lines across the concrete floor, a moiré effect that shifts with the sun's angle and gives the passage a cinematic quality without trying. The colonnade connects interior rooms to courtyard, pool, and outdoor kitchen, functioning as a circulation spine that is simultaneously a place to linger.

Wide stone steps with gabion retaining walls lead up to a terrace pavilion, establishing a sequence of outdoor rooms at different elevations. The gravel courtyard with planted beds at the base of the colonnade operates as a transitional zone, neither fully inside nor out. These thresholds are the project's real spatial achievement: the house is not a box you enter but a gradient you move through.

Pool and Landscape as Extension

The pool terrace is bordered by dry stone walls and framed by native plantings and olive groves, which means it avoids the manicured resort aesthetic that plagues so many Mediterranean rental properties. Canvas lounge chairs sit directly on stone, and the pool edge is clean and unadorned. The landscape strategy is one of restraint: cacti in terracotta pots, gravel paths, and existing trees left in place.

Steel-framed glass doors open directly from interior rooms onto gravel courtyards, collapsing the threshold between the conditioned envelope and the garden. The effect is that the house feels much larger than its footprint suggests, because every room has a corresponding outdoor zone.

Kitchen and Built-In Furniture

The kitchen is the clearest expression of the project's commitment to built-in furniture. A pale plaster island with a bespoke terrazzo top anchors the room, flanked by open shelving and grooved cabinet doors that feel handmade because they are. Niches carved into the thick tufo walls serve as storage, eliminating the need for freestanding cabinetry and giving the room a monolithic quality. The approach extends into the living spaces, where recesses hold terracotta vessels and a long banquette wraps two edges of the room.

A narrow corridor lined with built-in timber shelving leads deeper into the house, its proportions tight enough to feel intimate without feeling cramped. Afternoon light filters through from windows at the far end, turning the passage into a warm amber channel. The consistency of material, plaster walls meeting timber shelves meeting limestone floors, keeps these transitional spaces from feeling like leftover circulation.

Living Spaces and Light

The living room is a lesson in how built-in furniture can define a space without dominating it. Shelving recesses display a curated collection of terracotta vessels and locally sourced antiques, while a low upholstered banquette replaces the conventional sofa. The effect is archaeological: the room looks like it was excavated rather than furnished. Exposed timber joists span between masonry columns, and warm light enters from multiple directions, connecting two seating areas into a single flowing space.

A cantilevered stone staircase glimpsed through the columns adds vertical drama to what is otherwise a deliberately horizontal house. The interplay of heavy masonry and the lighter timber ceiling creates a tension that keeps the interiors from feeling ponderous. Every window is sized and placed to frame a specific view: olive trees, sky, or the distant sea.

Bedrooms and Bathrooms

The bedrooms are spare in the best sense. Pale plaster walls, sheer curtains, and a few carefully chosen objects, a ladder-back chair, a woven-seat stool, a black vessel on an inlaid timber cabinet, create rooms that feel calm rather than empty. Two of the four bedrooms have ensuite bathrooms, and the material shift in the wet rooms is handled with precision: cocciopesto replaces lime wash where water meets wall, and custom sinks designed by the studio sit on travertine vanities.

The bathrooms are among the most compelling rooms in the house. An integrated stone sink with a brass wall-mounted faucet sits beneath a framed mirror, the detailing minimal but warm. A built-in bathtub beneath a casement window overlooks the terrace and olive trees, turning a functional room into a place of genuine pleasure. The outdoor sunken bathtub, enclosed by concrete block walls with exposed brass plumbing, is the project's most theatrical gesture, but even here the material restraint keeps it from tipping into indulgence.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals the organizational clarity that the photographs only hint at. Rectangular volumes are arranged around the pool in a loose courtyard configuration, with circular tree indicators marking the existing olives that structure the landscape. The plan reads as a series of discrete pavilions connected by the colonnade, an arrangement that gives each room its own orientation and view while maintaining the sense of a unified compound.

Why This Project Matters

Casa Maiora matters because it demonstrates that a studio can evolve its formal language without abandoning the principles that made its earlier work resonate. The shift from white vaults to pink lime wash and flat timber ceilings is not a stylistic reset but an expansion of vocabulary, rooted in the same commitment to local materials, passive climate strategies, and the slow craft of hand-finished surfaces. In a region where architectural tourism has turned the masseria typology into a cliché, this house offers a credible alternative that is historically grounded without being nostalgic.

More broadly, the project is a quiet argument for specificity over spectacle. Nothing here is imported, no exotic stone, no prefabricated cladding, no off-the-shelf fixtures. The tufo comes from nearby quarries, the lime wash from a local artisan, the terrazzo from another. The sinks are bespoke. The furniture is built in. The result is a house that could not exist anywhere else, which is, in the end, the only standard that matters for domestic architecture in a place this loaded with history and light.

Casa Maiora by Studio Andrew Trotter, Carovigno, Puglia, Italy. Completed 2022. Photography by Salva López.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.