The Ludovica and Roberto Palomba’s vacation home near Lecce, Puglia, is exactly how one would imagine the ideal, whitewashed Italian country house, romantically existing between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea’s coasts. Although the designers weren’t searching for such a property, when a friend took them to the house, which had stood abandoned for thirty years, they immediately understood its potential.

Constructed in the 1600’s as an oil mill, at the time the Palomba’s first saw it, the quirky 400 m² building possessed all the characteristics that would seem to make it unappealing to the less forward thinking—including fire-blackened tuf ceilings, steep sloping walls and indoors spaces immersed in darkness. But they didn’t see it that way. “It was really exciting upon first entering this house,” Roberto says. “With its walls reaching over six meters in height and its wide indoor spaces that were created by thick columns.”

They discovered most of the construction materials used in the remodel in the “poetic” Salento area. Thanks to the innate skills of local artisans the whole architectural remodel was completed in a mere five months.