Escape comes in many guises. For some of us, it’s a long cruise. For others, an off-the-grid cabin deep in the woods. For some, getting away means putting many miles between where they are and where they want to be. And then there’s the sun and the sea and spaces that make a home away from home.
When she isn’t busy running her fine leather goods company ATP Atelier, Maj-La Pizzelli and her Milanese husband, Claudio, head south from their place in Stockholm to a getaway in the Salento region of the Italian peninsula. The couple had been vacationing in the area for years before they bought their own sweet spot, an old house with a garden in Uggiano la Chiesa, a small town that’s a short drive to the beach at Porto Badisco. Previously owned by one family for over a century, the house was built by a fisherman who had gone to America and made good. When the Pizzelli’s bought it, they launched a rehab that took two years to complete.
“It was a huge project,” Maj-La shares about working with an architect and a contractor who specialize in reviving older houses in the Salento region. “The roof was falling in, so we needed to replace it completely. On the ground floor, we removed the cementine tiles, insulated underneath and then replaced them. We updated all the doors and windows but had a local carpenter make new ones in the traditional way.”
The homeowners added a new wall of glass doors leading to the garden, framed in iron forged by a local smith, and did up the bathrooms in microcement (a decorative wall coating similar to limewash) instead of tiles to achieve a minimalist look that merges well with the older character of the home. They removed the staircase to create two bathrooms and built a new one outside at the patio. “It is a house with a strange floor plan,” Maj-La explains, “and we were prioritizing making the best out of an old home.” The handsomely scaled garden got a refresh, too, with the addition of a pool and new plantings of bougainvillea.
The interiors of the home strike a lean, laid-back look, but one that expresses relaxed comfort. “I would say that it is very much our style to combine things, but still, this house is quite different from our apartment in Stockholm,” Maj-La notes. “I really think that we have kept the original feeling of the house, and at the same time, we have added a very Scandinavian, minimal touch to it. The furniture is a mix of items that belonged to the house, Scandinavian pieces and Italian contemporary design. We also have found a lot of fantastic pieces at the flea markets in Puglia and through our local antique dealer.”
The vaulted foyer sports a vintage rug purchased on a trip to Marrakech and a Tito Agnoli lounge chair from the 1960s. A Castiglioni Arco lamp hovers over the dining table, which is surrounded by a mixed bag of wooden chairs. The living room is outfitted with auction finds: Mario Bellini sofas, Gae Aulenti’s Tavolo con Ruote cocktail table, a molded plywood Eames chair, and Noguchi lamps. A pair of rattan garden chairs and an occasional table from Ikea occupy a second-floor sitting room, and the pendants above the custom travertine island in the kitchen are fashioned from fishermen’s nets. Like driftwood scooped up along the shore, this casa vacanza possesses a kind of found-object air, a just-rightness that usually, only chance and time can create. Bravo.
Photography by Johan Sellén.
Styling by Gill Renlund.
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