Convento di Santa Maria di Costantinopoli: A Keyless Salento Monastery With 14 Tons of Books
A Thatcher-era grandee and his wife filled a five-hundred-year-old Salento monastery with fourteen tons of books and the folk art of four continents
Mascienda Guadalupe could only have come from one person's specific imagination. Jennifer Andreu, a Mexican interior designer, grew up in Mexico City, moved to Milan to study, then kept rolling south until she reached the countryside outside Ostuni and decided to stay. The farmhouse she restored — a 1926 masseria she spent four years rescuing — is now what she calls the first Mexican masseria in Italy: a cross between a Pugliese farm and a Mexican hacienda, named for the Virgen de Guadalupe.
The most telling decision she made was one of refusal. When the local advice was to paint the old walls a clean white and make the place the usual photogenic, scrubbed-bright masseria, she left the original distressed plaster where it was, and laid local chianconi stone underfoot instead of the standard pietra di Trani. The house ends up with two homelands in it: Jalisco equipales (leather-and-wood chairs) and hammered-bronze tables, red-and-black barro ceramics and Yucatán hammocks, Oaxacan alebrijes (carved spirit-animals) and works by Mexican artists like Guillermo Olguín and Luvia Lazo — all of it set against bare Apulian stone.
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There are ten suites, each named for a Mexican place — Oaxaca, Tulum, Jalisco, Monterrey — opening onto terraces above the vineyards and olive groves. The kitchen, La Lupita, is run by cocineras (home cooks) making guacamole and tacos and empanadas alongside Pugliese plates, and the estate presses its own olive oil, Traiana, for the bruschetta. Drinks happen at the Don Ramón bar, where Jennifer pours mezcal — the agave spirit that, as they say in Oaxaca, doesn't get you drunk but lights you up.
It is, before it is a hotel, Jennifer and Panos's home — they live on the floors above — which is why it reads less like a property than like being taken in by interesting friends. Ostuni and its white lanes are a short drive, the coast not much further. Come for a few days, take the Oaxaca suite, and let Jennifer tell you how a girl from Mexico City ended up pressing olive oil in Puglia.
PROPERTY DNA
Ownership | Independent; a private home that takes a few guests, created by Lord Alistair McAlpine and his wife Athena, who runs it still |
Era & Design | A former Franciscan monastery, roughly 500 years old (14th–15th century); restored by the McAlpines from the early 2000s |
Setting | An unmarked door in a stone wall on the edge of Marittima di Diso, ~2 km from the Adriatic, near the bottom of the Salento |
Rooms | 8 bedrooms — the monks' original cells; sleeps ~15, and can be taken whole |
Designs & Makers | The McAlpines' lived-in collection of folk and tribal art from four continents; in the kitchen, the chef Pierluigi and his mother Cecilia |