A week in Ostuni

We spent a week between Ostuni and Cisternino looking at how the oldest houses in the region handle light, heat, and very little furniture beautifully.

The wall is the design

Lime plaster, layered by hand and left slightly imperfect, does more for a room than almost any piece of joinery. It catches the late sun and turns it into the room's warmest material.

Small openings, large rooms

Deep window reveals frame the landscape like paintings and keep the interior cool. The takeaway for a Gibraltar apartment is not the proportion but the principle — fewer, better-placed openings beat a glass wall.

Furniture as punctuation

One olive-wood stool, one long linen sofa, one woven pendant. Italian rural interiors taught us that the room comes first; the furniture is punctuation.

Bringing it home

You can borrow the palette — chalk, oat, terracotta and a single charcoal — and the discipline, without copying the architecture. That is what our Ostuni mood-board on the studio wall has become.