Masseria Sant’Aniello is a fortified farmhouse with origins in the 13th century, built under the Order of Malta. It sits in the Puglian countryside surrounded by ancient olive trees, facing the Mediterranean to the east and the mountains to the west.

The masseria comprises approximately 2,000 m² of built fabric: thick stone walls, cross-vaulted ceilings, a ground floor that once served as food depot and stabling, and a primary floor above. Each space carries a different character — a consequence of the building’s protective, additive logic over centuries.

The architecture is, at its core, a climate machine. Summer temperatures in this part of Puglia regularly exceed 40°C, yet the masseria requires no mechanical cooling. The mass of the walls — some over a metre thick — absorbs heat through the day and releases it slowly through the night. Cross vaults channel air through the interior; deep reveals shade the openings; organic materials breathe. The project has maintained this principle throughout, working entirely without air conditioning and using only natural materials. The building stays cool because it was always designed to.

The spa and pool complex occupies what was formerly the chicken run: a linear agricultural building of around 28 metres, structured by a sequence of six individual cross vaults. The architecture suggested its own programme. Each vault becomes a room in the spa sequence — a progression from arrival through treatment to water — the cellular rhythm of the old farm building reinterpreted as a logic of ritual and rest. The complex opens into a new garden of exotic planting and ancient stone courtyards, where the boundary between inside and outside dissolves.

The gardens are conceived as a progression — a series of distinct worlds moving from the deeply historic to the newly wild. Closest to the masseria is the agrumeto: a classical citrus garden of exceptional beauty and integrity, enclosed within high walls and planted with a formal symmetry of orange, mandarin and lemon trees, fragrant and largely unchanged. Beyond it, a scented herb garden, then an orchard, then a kitchen garden — a farm-to-table sequence that connects the house to the land it was always built to work. At the furthest point from the house, surrounding the spa, a new exotic garden: lush, tropical in character, private and sensory — a deliberate counterpoint to the austerity of the stone.