Ancient history blends with modern design and natural materials at a rustic Italian holiday home near the Adriatic Sea
meet & greet
Olenka Airasca (singer and interior designer), her partner Andrea (interior design) and their son Noah.
the property
Two-bedroom historic Salento farmhouse-turned-holiday house near Ostuni, Puglia, Italy.
In the Salento countryside, with the blue sea in the background, the stillness interrupted only by the sound of cicadas, Olenka Airasca likes nothing better than taking a few days off
at La Cabane Ostuni. A few kilometres from the centre of Ostuni, in Italy’s Puglia region, her holiday home is 80sqm of pure relaxation with a solarium on the roof that has panoramic views of the coast and rows of ancient olive trees, grapevines and fruit trees.
During the year, Olenka lives between Bordighera in Liguria and nearby Monaco with her partner Andrea and their son Noah. She is a singer, art director of a well-known club and also works on interior design projects between France and Liguria with Andrea from their studio, Olenkainteriors.
“We needed to return to a rustic life, a home away from the bling-bling of the French Riviera,” she says. “When I’m not working, I prefer silence, above all.”
They found this post-war lamia (a typical local country house) after stopping in Ostuni during one of their many property searches for old, abandoned structures to buy, renovate and transform into holiday homes.
“However, the Cabane has effectively become our home, we only rent it when we can’t come here. We fell in love with this location and the breathtaking view of the Ostuni coast, which is about 10 minutes away, and isn’t far from the villages of Polignano and Alberobello. Andrea is half Puglian and used to spend the summer months here during his childhood.”
It is a typical small rural cottage made of tuff stone (a construction stone common in Italy) and white lime. “When we bought it, in 2019, just before the lockdown, it had been abandoned for decades,” she says. “The structure was healthy, but it took time to restore it.”
In order to keep the budget under control, Olenka and Andrea worked on the restoration project themselves, helped by a team of local craftsmen skilled in tuff stone processing techniques. “The walls are just the same as in the past, so the windows and the external sheet metal frames. We only added a staircase to connect the room with the oven, where the old owners used to bake bread, to the house.”
The layout is simple. A parallelepiped structure with a central living room and two bedrooms facing it from the right and the left. The kitchen is small but perfect, with everything necessary positioned nearby. “We eat lunch outdoors under the pergola in front of the entrance,” says Olenka.
Quartz dust mixed with cement replaced the old grit flooring. “It was a farmhouse, we wanted to preserve its peculiar rustic style by interpreting it our own way,” she says, achieving this with a mix of tradition and contemporary Mediterranean style.
Olenka used cement tiles from an old building in Lecce as flooring in the main bedroom and replaced a door in the living room with a large, ornate door from Rajasthan. “I found it some time ago in an ad. It is the most important piece in the house. I have a passion for old doors of all kinds.”
In the bedroom, there is also a sliding door from a San Remo chicken coop. “Randomly chosen pieces have found a home and their place inside the house.”
The space is cosy, with the furnishings – almost all repurposed or designed and made by Olenka and Andrea – fit for purpose in regards to materials and colours. In fact, new or old, everything seems to have always been there, from the lamps made from old fishermen’s creels to the Acapulco armchairs on the roof terrace overlooking the countryside and the sea.
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