Masseria Moroseta: The Most-Photographed Masseria in Puglia

You have, almost certainly, seen Masseria Moroseta — chalk-white arches against an olive grove, the most-photographed small hotel in Puglia, the image that launched a thousand imitators. Here is the part the pictures leave out: it isn't old. Andrew Trotter built it from scratch in 2016, his first project as an architect, and it became the reference point for the modern Puglian masseria precisely because it understood the old ones better than most restorations do.

The owner, Carlo Lanzini, wanted a modern building rooted in tradition, and Trotter gave him one made almost entirely of the place itself: local sandstone tufo on the façades, chianco stone underfoot, walls a meter thick to hold the cool, a central courtyard, and a long pool laid along the ridge — the stones recycled from the excavation, the power solar, the water its own. There are six rooms and no more, set around the courtyard, half opening onto private gardens and half onto terraces, the interiors vaulted and spare with Gervasoni pieces and Flos light.

What keeps it from being merely beautiful is that it works. The masseria sits in five hectares of olive groves — some of the trees five centuries old — and presses its own organic oil; the kitchen garden grows forty-odd kinds of fruit and vegetable, the eggs come from the hens, and dinner is one long communal table. Since 2017 the kitchen has belonged to Giorgia Goggi, the Milan-born chef who arrived for a residency and stayed, cooking whatever the garden gives her that morning.

It's three kilometers from Ostuni, the White City, and a short drive from Cisternino, Alberobello and the coast at Torre Guaceto. So yes — it's the obvious one, the design-magazine darling — but the obviousness is earned, and six rooms means it never feels like a set. Come in spring or fall, take a room with a private garden, and eat whatever Goggi puts in front of you.

PROPERTY DNA