How a Former Hollywood Exec Turned a Derelict Italian Villa Into a Stunning Home
Not usual for new homeowners to gripe about the sorry state their predecessors left the property in—a leaky pool, a chimney to rival the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or a bathroom that looked like it belonged in a gas station. But Gustavo Antonioni can go so far as to say that the previous residents of his retreat in the Puglia region of Italy lived like animals.
To be fair, they were animals. About 200 goats had made themselves at home inside the once-aristocratic villa of a centuries-old masseria, or agricultural estate, that he was about to restore. The need to pressure-wash the entire interior would become but a minor inconvenience in a halting seven-year project that was filled with challenges before culminating in an elegantly modern interpretation of a historic property.
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Pre-renovation, Antonioni was based in London, where he oversaw the European marketing and licensing teams for various leading global entertainment companies. Born in Argentina to Italian and Greek parents and raised in Mexico, the cosmopolitan executive had moved to the U.S. in the early ’80s with his family, finally settling down in Connecticut. In 2010, a close friend brought him to Puglia for the first time. “I didn’t know much about it but fell in love with its raw and pristine beauty immediately,” he says. Burnt out and plotting a career change, he began a house hunt in the region, in the heel of Italy’s boot.
Diving into what became a six-year search, he started looking for a two- or three-bedroom country home. Eventually, his Realtor brought him to an 18th-century nobleman’s villa in Latiano, crumbling from neglect. “The house was unlivable,” says Antonioni. Set on over 40 acres and flanked by a stable on each side, the property, called Masseria Partemio—Spanish for “part of me”—had been vacant for nearly five decades, except for the herd of goats ensconced in the 10,000-square-foot house (the sight of which somehow reminded Antonioni of his late Westie, Ippolito). The masseria lacked electricity, let alone heat and running water.
“I called my mom, and I said, ‘I just saw this amazing house. The energy is incredible. It’s a pile of rocks, but I found 200 Ippolitos there,’ ” he recalls. Parts of the Palladian structure date to 1753, when it was built as a hunting lodge, while sections of it, including a Moorish-style tower, were added in the mid-1800s. During this period, the residence was handed over to a group of Benedictine nuns of the Diocese of Oria, who turned the estate into an olive farm and dairy. Roughly a century later, a wealthy family from Latiano bought it to use as a country house. By the mid-1970s, no one was living there.
The theme of the project was to make the ancient present, to live in a historical space with contemporary desires.
After he toured the curious-looking compound, Antonioni couldn’t stop thinking about it. “You have the Spanish, Greek, and Italian architecture in this really dry land,” he says. “It reminded me of the parts of Greece that I fell in love with but couldn’t find anymore.” Then, the way he tells it, fate stepped in. “I called the Realtor and said, ‘Look, I’m really interested in the house—tell me more about it,’ ” he recalls. “And then he proceeds to tell me that the owner’s name is Ippolito.” The house may have been covered in hay and had trees growing out of it, but Antonioni was inspired to create something he could leave behind for his extended family and generations to come. The only problem: The property wasn’t actually for sale. So he left and waited a year for it to come on the market.
“There are a lot of these beautiful, historic properties littered throughout Puglia,” Antonioni explains. “They tend to stay empty because they’re either in internal family disputes because there are a lot of heirs involved and they can’t figure out how to sell it, or they can’t find all the heirs to sign the paperwork to liquidate them.”
When Antonioni finally closed on the property in June 2017, Partemio was in a state of decay: covered in moss, with no foundation to speak of, no floor tiles, and no windows. As for the goats, he was concerned his Weimaraners, Ellie and Ludo, might start hunting them, so he persuaded the shepherd to return the herd to the local family that owned them. Having graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a concentration in architecture, and with previous renovations in London, Miami, and Los Angeles under his belt, Antonioni was excited to take on a design project with a historic-preservation component, though its scale was daunting. Plus, because Partemio is a historic-listed house, any alterations affecting the facade required the approval of a local council in Bari, and getting the green light wasn’t easy. “The reality is, if I didn’t do this, somebody would have come in and either done a really terrible, cheesy restaurant or it would still be in ruins,” Antonioni says.
He connected with local architect Maria Formosi, and work began that September—a delicate task, given the estate’s age and Puglia’s strict rules around renovating historic buildings. “She’s actually the supervisor of all the churches that are being rebuilt in southern Puglia,” Antonioni notes. “I learned a lot from her about how these buildings are built, maintained, restored, and how to respect them, which is part of the ethos that I wanted.”
Luckily, Formosi was already familiar with Partemio. “It’s very famous because of the color of the facade,” she says, referring to its distinctive Pompeian-red and ochre-yellow hue. “The theme of the project was to make the ancient present, to live in a historical space with contemporary desires, respectfully dialoguing with traditional materials.”
What was estimated as a three-year project ended up taking over seven—complete with two different contractors, pushback from city officials, and a global pandemic. In one instance, Antonioni’s architectural vision and the building commissioner’s resistance to change resulted in a clash over iron window frames that dragged on for seven months. Formosi left the job after a year, amid disputes with the first builder.
By 2019, Antonioni needed a break, even if that meant decamping to the Netherlands. (He now works remotely for a large merchandising company there.) “I left for two years,” he says. “I went back to the entertainment industry, I got my wits, and when I returned, I got it done in a much more relaxed way where I wasn’t getting upset that the timelines were taking longer. I knew how to deal.”
From the outside, the five-bedroom house still looks much the same as it did when it was originally built. Its columns are intact, as is its stately exterior constructed from thick local limestone. During the renovation, Formosi taught Antonioni the recipe to re-create the original Pompeian red, which included boiling down animal bones, mixing the paste with ferrous oxide, and smearing it onto the stone until a patina formed on the surface. “There were a lot of parts that were really ruined, so we had to rebuild with the same techniques,” she says.
Because the residence was being used as a shelter for livestock, the previous owners had slathered the interior with white calcium paint, commonly used in the Mediterranean for its disinfectant properties. To remove it, Antonioni started by stripping back the ceilings in the entranceway and living room, which, to his surprise, revealed striking blue frescoes underneath. Each of the property’s 13 vaults, all of which required reinforcement, form an eight-pointed star—a symbol of the original owner’s affiliation with the Maltese cross.
As the sun sets in the west, the entire house turns this bright orange. It’s beautiful.
For the floors, Antonioni, who undertook the decor himself, went a more contemporary route while still celebrating the region. “Typically, this would have been stone floors,” he says. “The people in Puglia couldn’t afford marble, so they would take marble chips and mix them with cement, and that’s how you get terrazzo. I put them there on purpose.” In the entry, Antonioni laid down traditional cementina tiles that he found at an antiques market. Ceramics, linen upholstery, and local crafts blend seamlessly throughout the home, as does Antonioni’s personal assemblage of artworks by Justin Dingwall, Allison Mills, and Adam Ball, among others.
Beyond the restoration work, the biggest alteration was opening four small rooms in the main house to create one big living area, with a white wrought-iron chandelier hanging overhead as the focal point and a curved sofa by B&B Italia facing the fireplace. On the opposite side of the room, a separate seating area features a pair of armchairs that Antonioni reupholstered in a creamy raffia fabric. In what was the eastern stable, just across the courtyard from the main house, he tied together suites with more second-hand finds from Puglia, including recycled light fixtures crafted from fishing nets used in Gallipoli. In fact, the only furnishings he bought new were the high-end mattresses.
The western stable, which connects to the main house, now serves as a kitchen and dining room, with sleek stainless-steel counters and two custom oak tables. For the patio, Antonioni commissioned a 40-foot-long cement table in the same shade of red as the exterior. “I like the combination of the contemporary with the modern, the modern with the historic,” he says. “That’s what you see in the kitchen, and that’s also what you see outside.”
The maroon- and ivory-striped cementina-tiled swimming pool, once a feeding trough for animals, takes inspiration from 1970s Capri, while the tower was turned into the house’s social hub. Antonioni likes to host friends there for evening happy hours. “Because it faces north to south, as the sun sets in the west, the entire house turns this bright orange,” he says. “It’s beautiful.”
With most of the work completed, Antonioni moved into Partemio last June. But he still has plans for further development, including turning a small structure on the property into a guest house, which he hopes will be ready by next year, and running the property as a luxe bed-and-breakfast. He plans a test run this summer. “We have this saying: Piano, piano si va lontano,” he says. “ ‘Slowly, slowly, you will go far.’ Which is what I’ve found.”
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