An architect's strikingly modern take on traditional Puglian architecture

There are two very different towers in the small village in Puglia in which Lorenzo Grifantini and his wife, Allegra Figus, have made a home for themselves. One is the bell tower of the local church and the other is La Torre Bianca (The White Tower), which forms the lynchpin of this new family home, arranged around a hidden courtyard. Situated almost at the tip of the heel of Italy, a few miles from the coast, La Torre Bianca is a unique family escape.

‘From the top of the tower, we can see all the way to the sea,’ says architect Lorenzo, the co-founder of London-based architectural firm DOS. ‘It is in line with the church tower, but also reminiscent of the many towers scattered along the coast in Salento, which were originally built centuries ago to defend the locals against the Saracens. A courtyard house might be more unusual in a little village like this, but it was important to us that the way the house was conceived and designed meant it doesn’t look like something that is out of touch with its surroundings. It looks as though it is well planted and grounded in the fabric of the village.’

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Lorenzo and Allegra both grew up in Rome, but met on the Aeolian island of Filicudi. They now live in London with their two children, Margherita, 10, and Alessandro, eight. They started to spend their summer holidays with family and friends in Salento, which Lorenzo first visited in his twenties, and they began to think about having a place here themselves.

‘About 10 years ago, we started renting masserias with my parents, my sister, my nephews – a typically large Italian family get-together,’ says Lorenzo. ‘Allegra and I decided that it would be a great place to have a home. We spent three years searching – we didn’t know whether we wanted to be in the middle of the countryside, or have an old house in one of the villages. The other option was to buy some land and build something. Then we found a little advertisement for a site adjacent to the historic centre of a village that we knew well and both liked, from which we can walk to the sea in 10 minutes.’

The empty parcel of land for sale had been used by a local farmer to grow tomatoes. Almost at once, Lorenzo saw that a modern courtyard house with a walled garden would suit the setting perfectly, providing privacy from the neighbouring buildings and creating a sheltered enclave. Having bought the site, he began drawing up ideas for the new house, with the main living spaces flowing out into the secret garden, with its terraces and swimming pool. The architect – who previously worked with Zaha Hadid, and at Foster & Partners and Ken Shuttleworth’s Make architects before launching DOS with Tavis Wright – placed two bedrooms and bathrooms up in the tower above a generously scaled ground-floor space. A further three bedrooms and bathrooms were arranged in an L shape across the courtyard, an arrangement that allows visiting friends and extended family a degree of privacy.

‘There was this incredible energy to the place when we first saw it,’ says Lorenzo. ‘It was sunset and there was this amazing warm light. I had a vision of what we could do here almost straight away. The combination of the courtyard and the tower gave us a way of creating the house without competing with the surroundings, and of doing something new that is not subdued but is in character.’