Pirnello Farmhouse Reclaims a Puglian Masseria for Contemporary Life
Pirnello Farmhouse stands among fields outside Cisternino, Italy, its pale stone volumes catching the southern light. Flore & Venezia guide the 18th-century masseria from working farmstead to lived-in farmhouse, reading each layer with care. The project keeps the rural character close while weaving contemporary comfort through vaulted rooms, shaded terraces, and gardens shaped for long days and late evenings.
Late sun brushes the limestone walls as the farmhouse rises from its fields, a pale geometry against the dark hills beyond. Gravel crunches underfoot, lavender edges the path, and shutters in dusty blues break the broad façades.
Inside, the old agricultural compound reads as a continuous farmhouse, yet its many lives stay visible in the vaulted ceilings, thick walls, and deep thresholds. This is a working restoration, not a reset. Flore & Venezia approach Masseria Pirnello as an inhabited organism, preserving trulli, former stables, and the hypogeal olive mill while threading today’s rooms through historic masonry.
Reading The Farmyard
Approach still happens through a simple courtyard edged by rough stone walls and tall grass. Old agricultural alignments govern the sequence, so arrival moves from outer gravel to inner garden, then into the house. The main volume holds its bell gable and balustraded terrace, while smaller wings and trulli keep a more utilitarian geometry that recalls barns and storage rooms.
Reworking Historic Volumes
The restoration hinges on subtraction; Flore & Venezia strip away accretions that blurred the original masonry while retaining traces that speak of work and harvest. In the hypogeal mill, the large stone grinding wheel and timber shaft remain in place, now surrounded by pale flooring and low arches that let visitors read the industrial core at close range. Across the complex, vaults are cleaned, joints calmed, and new openings cut sparingly, so every intervention reads as a precise contemporary layer over centuries of use.
Rooms For Contemporary Life
Interiors lean on light, texture, and collected objects rather than overt contrast. In the main sitting room, thick vaults descend toward a stone fireplace, with sofas, armchairs, and dark timber tables gathered around a wrought-iron chandelier. The kitchen keeps the same arched ceilings, framing white cabinetry, a central island, and a traditional range, where daylight from small windows falls across plastered walls and pale counters.
Elsewhere, an enfilade of rooms unfolds under repeating vaults; doorways are widened just enough to connect views while maintaining the sense of distinct chambers. The dining room carries long wooden tables and woven chairs over patterned rugs, while walls hold clocks, framed prints, and plates that anchor domestic rituals in the building’s deep time.
Landscape And Thresholds
Outdoors, the agricultural fields give way to layered gardens, dry-stone terraces, and a linear pool edged in the same rough limestone as the enclosure walls. A pergola with a timber canopy creates an open-air living room, where sofas and wicker chairs look out over planted borders and distant trees. On the upper level, a large arched window with a dark metal grid turns the bathroom into a belvedere, framing hills and sky above a freestanding tub and patterned floor.
In the evening, interior chandeliers and sconces glow against the off-white stone while exterior walls fade into the landscape. The farmhouse returns to its role as a lived-in rural complex, shaped by Flore & Venezia so that everyday routines converse with agricultural memory and the steady horizon of the Valle d’Itria.
Photography by Carlo Oriente
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