Casa Essenza, a vacation home rental in Puglia, Italy

Serene and Simple

Understated and unobtrusively attractive, this newly constructed villa offers a calm, straightforward architectural style befitting of its “Essential House” name.

Unwinding comes easily inside this welcoming, stone-on-stucco home in lyrical Puglia, land of charmed trulli, historical villages, vineyards, olive groves and two nearby seashores. Big windows flood the strong-lined, geometric rooms with light, and a subdued décor palette warms the angular concrete, stone, and wood spaces, offsetting the stark, new home whites and cool greys with rich brown linens and furnishings in soothing shades of sand and stone. A shaded patio runs the villa’s length, elevated above the pool outside the modern kitchen’s sliding doors. Furnished for dining, the patio is joined below by sun loungers and side tables, set around the crisp modern home’s infinity pool.

Around

Located in the heart of the Valle d’Itria, steps from the UNESCO-classified White City of Ostuni, a vivid historical community that clings to a nearby hilltop, this home makes a conveniently contemporary base from which to explore this storied region. Puglia is a dream vacation destination, a land of whitewashed villas, labyrinthine villages, crystalline waters and fragrant herbs, not to mention freshly pressed olive oil, daily caught seafood and stellar, garden-to-table gastronomy. The rocky coves and clear waters of the Adriatic Sea are only minutes from the home, and the World Wildlife Fund’s nature reserve at Torre Guaceto is not to be missed. The home is set in a sea of olive trees, with easy access to the lively port towns of Polignano a Mare and Monopoli.

Puglia is famed for its dry stacked, conical trulli homes, former agricultural storages that today are mostly fairtytale private getaways dotting the rural landscape. Thousands of trulli are concentrated in and around Alberobello, a UNESCO classified location that’s a quick trip away. Other picturesque villages of note nearby include Cisternino and Locorotondo. While the closest beach is along the Adriatic Sea, the waters of the Ionian Sea, filling the space between Italy’s boot heel and toe, await with a litte extra effort to get there.