Two monumental stone arches, buried for decades under later renovations, surfaced during construction and ended up deciding the whole plan Valari Studio built for Masseria Ficazzella, a farmhouse outside Fasano turned into a family home. The Los Angeles couple who commissioned it weren’t chasing a postcard version of rural Puglia — they wanted a house that answered to their own history as much as to the region’s. What the arches gave the architects was a plan they didn’t have to invent.
Erika and Dan Berlind found the property on a 2022 trip to Puglia, looking specifically for a masseria near the coast with an Adriatic view, a few hectares of land, olive trees, and room to grow into a family house. “The moment we arrived at Ficazzella, we understood immediately this was the place we were looking for,” the couple say.
What they were really looking for, it turned out, traced back further than that trip: Dan grew up on the beaches of Los Angeles, Erika on her grandmother’s farm in Texas, and the brief they gave Valari Studio asked for a house that could hold both of those childhoods at once — open enough for a crowd, private enough for two. The 680-square-metre (7,300-square-foot) restoration was finished in time for the couple’s wedding, celebrated on-site with 100 guests over three days that September.
Those two arches, hidden under accumulated finishes and rediscovered mid-construction, now define the living room and the entrance — the clearest sign of how little the tufo stone structure was altered. Their recovery brought new light into the interior and restored a sense of continuity across the sequence of vaulted rooms that the building had lost through decades of piecemeal changes.
Small openings and targeted apertures work with those recovered arches to soften the farmhouse’s traditionally closed character, orienting the spaces toward the olive groves, the Selva di Fasano, and, further out, the Adriatic. “They didn’t want to live the typical American dream of the old Italian house,” say architects Federica Russo and Nicolò Lewanski, who developed the project with architect Domenico Sasso. “Often what people look for is really just a reconstruction, a historical fake, a vernacular stage set. Here the intention was to give the building new life and build it a future.”
Materials stay close to what the region already knows how to make. Lime-washed stone walls and vaults meet continuous microcement floors, dark bronze window frames, natural oak, and brass detailing, much of it produced with Puglian craftspeople: a Lecce stone dining table, and monolithic graniglia washbasins reworked from the traditional Puglian stone basin. “Our approach is always a balance between the memory of a building and the times we live in,” the architects say of the wider design language.
The kitchen island, built as a single oak volume, was designed specifically to hide its own barstools inside it when not in use — one of several pieces of custom joinery that sit flush with or recessed into the original masonry rather than sitting apart from it. At the centre of the open living, kitchen, and dining area, a sunken conversation pit keeps a direct sightline to the garden, while four guest suites and a study fill out the rest of the plan.
Outside, the estate kept its working character rather than becoming a designed garden: goats and ducks left behind by the previous owners still live among the olive trees, alongside Hendrix and Fia, the two dogs Erika and Dan brought with them from Los Angeles. Landscape architect Gianni Birardi threaded Mediterranean planting through the grounds, while the terraces — a small pool, an outdoor kitchen, a stepped seating area facing the sunset over the Selva di Fasano — extend the same restraint found at Masseria Torre, another recent Puglian restoration where flore venezia worked with comparably quiet precision.
By the time their wedding filled the courtyard that September, the arches that had shaped every decision before it were already just part of the architecture — not a discovery on display, but the rooms everyone was standing in.
Masseria Ficazzella by Valari Studio | Location: Fasano (Brindisi), Italy — Year: 2026 — Key materials: tufo stone, lime wash, microcement, natural oak, dark bronze, brass, Lecce stone, graniglia