Tenuta Negroamaro: Ten Suites of "No Shoes, No News" Above the Ionian Salento
An owner's slow-living hideaway near Gallipoli; ten suites by the London designer Olga Ashby, built around the existing olive and cactus, with the estate's own Negroamaro in the glass.
Tenuta Negroamaro keeps its cards close by design. The owner — Puglia-born, London-based since he was sixteen — stays out of the frame, and the house he's made runs on a single instruction he likes to give arriving guests: no shoes, no news. It's a ten-suite hideaway on the Ionian side of the Salento, a few kilometers inland from Gallipoli, and it doesn't trade on a grand date or a noble name. It trades on calm.
The interiors are the work of the London designer Olga Ashby, brought in after an earlier team missed the mark. She spent a week soaking up the Salento light before she touched anything, then built around what was already growing — "I didn't want to cut a single tree." The result is what the trade calls organic chic and everyone else calls restful: local Pietra Leccese stone and travertine underfoot, jute and raw linen, unpolished surfaces, walls washed the color of a ripe peach. Ten suites, each with a private terrace and some with a plunge pool; one is set inside a trullo, the conical dry-stone house of the region.
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The estate is a working seven hectares — vegetable and herb gardens, hens, and a vineyard that makes the house's own Negroamaro, the deep red grape it's named for. Breakfast is homemade pasticciotti (the Salento's custard-filled pastry) and marmalade from the estate's own clementines; the pool bar pours caffè leccese (iced coffee with almond milk) and prickly-pear cocktails from the cactus that grows in the red soil all around. The cooking is farm-to-table in the literal sense, with visiting chefs running the kitchen and the classes.
It's a young place, and it doesn't pretend otherwise — no centuries of provenance here, just a clear idea carried out with taste. Gallipoli is four kilometers off and the Ionian beaches ten minutes; Brindisi's airport is about an hour. Come to disappear for a few days; take the trullo, leave your shoes at the door, and pour a glass of the Negroamaro that gave the place its name.
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 |