Inside Collette Dinnigan's family home in Puglia, Italy
Collette Dinnigan has created an idyllic family retreat in Puglia, harnessing local skills and crafts to express her unique design sensibility.
When designer Collette Dinnigan, her husband Bradley Cocks and children Estella and Hunter took off for a year’s sabbatical to enjoy the Italian bella vita in 2016, making the country their second home was the last thing they imagined doing. “At the time it was just a really big adventure,” says Dinnigan as she bustles around the generously proportioned kitchen in Casa Olivetta, the 500-year-old farmhouse the couple have spent four years renovating in the Puglian region of Ostuni, about an hour’s drive from either Bari or Brindisi.
The area’s rough-and-tumble beauty captured their hearts during a three-month road trip in the summer of that year. Starting in Sicily, the family wound their way from Palermo to Messina, and “although we had lots of flights booked to different places we decided to keep the hire car and just keep driving”, recounts Dinnigan. They crossed over to the mainland by ferry and journeyed around Calabria and Basilicata before arriving in the Apulian region, the southern area that forms the heel of Italy’s “boot”. “We loved Puglia’s wildness and found the old masserias enchanting. It felt like uncharted territory.”
Dinnigan has always loved travelling off the beaten track, perhaps the legacy of her early childhood years, spent living at sea with her parents and younger brother Seamus. In Puglia, Dinnigan and Cocks were immediately drawn to the region’s history. It’s famous for its olive oil – originally harvested from the 16th to the 19th centuries as good quality oil for lamps rather than for cooking, because it didn’t turn the lamp glass black – and the charm of old towns such as Locorotondo and Cisternino, with their leafy squares and traditional trattorias.
It was while out for a walk, staying at a house just down the road from where the family is now based, that they spotted the “for sale” sign on the old farmhouse. By this point they had been looking for properties in earnest. “We’d probably seen 50 to a 100 trulli and old houses, travelling from one side of the region to the other,” Dinnigan remembers. “Suddenly we walked down this winding road and thought, ‘this is it’.”
After a year’s negotiation with the five brothers who owned the house – “a very typical Italian story” – and then another three spent transforming it into a warm, welcoming four-bedroom family home, “it has been a true labour of love,” Dinnigan affirms. She travelled back and forth almost weekly from their base in Rome to deal with local builders and craftsmen. “I now know more Italian building terms and words for food than anything else – there are certainly no verbs used and everything is in the present tense,” she laughs.
Here, nestled in the heart of the Valle D’Itria and a 10-minute drive from La Città Bianca, the whitewashed town of Ostuni, the sun casts a glorious golden glow across Casa Olivetta’s mottled local Lecce limestone façade. It exudes a much softer, gentler aesthetic than the bright white silhouettes of the traditional conical-roofed trulli and flat-roofed, fifties-style modernist houses (often with a dash of paprika red used to paint the ironwork) found in the area.
It is surrounded by almost five acres of terraced ancient olive groves, and an orchard bursting with apricots, pears, almonds and plums, lending a soothing softness also to the landscaping, where Dinnigan and Cocks have created a myriad of nooks for dining, reading, chatting and snoozing. There is a shaded cabana with daybeds by the pool, which in summer is almost engulfed by borders of the local wildflower, designed to encourage languid lounging. A bamboo-roofed pergola, weighted heavily with grape vines, proves the perfect spot for long, lazy lunches; another seating area by the pizza oven is a cosy enclave at night when a little warmth is needed.
The roof terrace on top of the main house is ideal for taking a sunset aperitif while appreciating the spectacular view of olive groves stretching as far as the eye can see across the valley. A separate one-bedroom apartment located across the main courtyard from the house enjoys its own quiet, secluded seating area, with heavenly morning sunshine and a sculptural mass of the local prickly pear cactus for company.
Outside, it could be either scorching hot or wild and wet as a storm rages, but inside, thanks to the kitchen’s thick, centuries-old stone walls (newly grouted because “they used to only use mud, which of course in winter absorbs moisture and in summer drops like dust”) there is a feeling of instant, embracing, anechoic calm. “I first thought I’d put the kitchen where the middle bedrooms were because in Italy the kitchen is usually in one of the darkest, coolest rooms,” says Dinnigan. “But I thought, you know what, we’re Australian, we live in the kitchen; we need to have a place to walk straight to the table outside because we’re all about alfresco dining.”
So instead she moved the bedrooms into the inner, more secluded rooms, split what was once the vaulted-ceilinged barn into the kitchen and a generous bathroom with walk-in shower, and added a small extension at the back to create another guest bedroom. Leading off the lower-ceilinged entrance hallway is a relaxed living room with oversized banquette seating upholstered in a fresh blue and white striped ticking. This then leads to the master bedroom and ensuite, both of which cover the area where olive oil was once made (the floor now covers the old hollow olive press vat).
Where possible, “all the old bits have stayed old”, says Dinnigan of keeping the exposed stone walls and original fireplaces. She has complemented these with worn timber beams and handmade antico terracotta floor tiles salvaged from Belgium, and bedroom cabinetry made to look like the house’s original doors. The result feels, however, far from rustic. “While the idea for Casa Olivetta was all about escape and comfort, it was also important to me that it be very elegant and sophisticated,” she says.
The interiors also chime with the way “Puglia feels like a world well travelled”, says Dinnigan. “Being close to North Africa, the region has a sense of the eclectic and exotic,” she adds, explaining her choice to mix classic Italian ironmongery, including dining chairs with curved curule-bases, with antique pieces, such as chandeliers, consoles and a heavy stone sink (once an old Roman fountain which took eight men to lift into place), sourced from markets in Rome and Palma. Some pieces were found locally too, “rescued from quite well-known homes in Puglia we think once belonging to old Milanesi or Tuscan families who had places down south for their summer holidays”.
Dotted around bedroom walls are pretty crystal-beaded sconces and little framed Puglinese landscapes. “My choice of art is never obvious – I love the idea that nothing’s too important and yet it brings you back to look again,” Dinnigan says. She also uses art as a colour guide – “like the big painting of a bucolic scene in the master bedroom, where I worked with shades of dark green and a touch of red, because colour is so important when putting things together”.
Other hints of red echoing through the house – from bespoke handwoven blankets or vintage eiderdowns on the beds, dinky lampshades, and even a potted geranium spied through an open window or French door – have been inspired by the original red and white geometric patterned floor found in the central spare bedroom.
Being in Italy has also honed the designer’s eye for authenticity. “Australia is now much more for me about light and being contemporary,” she says. “For so long I’ve tried to put a European touch to what I do, but I realise it is no longer about that. You can’t recreate old in a new country.” Equally, when in Italy, “something French or Balinese doesn’t necessarily work either. You need to use what’s local; in fact, it is increasingly evident to me that wherever I am in the world it’s important to use what’s local because it fits the landscape.”
Consequently, she has scoured the Puglian countryside for little towns with family-run businesses specialising in bespoke linens or hand-thrown ceramics. In the kitchen, Dinnigan has used handmade tiles for the splashback, the deep green of which was custom mixed and fired to match the designer’s large collection of old splattered Puglinese pottery. She also designed the elegant canopy beds in collaboration with the same artisan who crafted the iron beds at fellow Australian Rob Potter Sanders’ hotel Masseria Trapanà in nearby Lecce.
Each season brings new joys. With primavera (spring) comes “flowers everywhere – poppies, chamomile – and wild asparagus”, she enthuses. “We pick rocket from the fields as we collect olive wood branches for the fire. In the summer there is a harshness because of the heat, but there’s also something very soft about the skies, in pinks and blues, against the area’s white walls and olive trees,” she says. “Being able to lie by the pool is very tranquil, but in the winter it’s very different again. It’s about fires and heartiness – it’s much more robust, naked and strong.”
Much of Casa Olivetta life is about cooking and replicating the simplicity of the cucina povera dishes Dinnigan so loves, from lightly grilled fish and bowls of pasta tossed with cima di rapa (turnip tops) or vongole (clams), to juicy roasted chickens and garlicky potatoes. Dinnigan never misses the Saturday morning market in Ostuni, where trestle tables heave with fresh, local seasonal produce, and during lockdown the couple added a substantial organic kitchen garden at the back of the second courtyard.
“One week we’re making strawberry jam, the next we’re pickling beetroot. There is an endless abundance here, where something ripens in a week, and then it’s gone,” enthuses Dinnigan. A brilliant cook, she brings magic to even the simplest slow-cooked pomodoro sauce, which she ladles generously over big bowls of spaghetti. Throughout the verdant terraced beds surrounding the house, she has planted lavender, rosemary and thyme. Caper bushes burst forth with pink and white flowers “too pretty to cut”. On a hot summer’s night they water the nearly metre-high mint “and it smells just like Moroccan mint tea,” the designer sighs contentedly.
The result is a house where the family and their friends can truly unwind. “Its calming feeling really helps to bring everything down a big notch,” Dinnigan says. It all feels so utterly effortless, and in a way, she agrees.
“Italy is very effortless, and yet it constantly contradicts itself, especially with its incredibly complicated bureaucracy. But of all the countries in the world I think it is one of the easiest and the most family-oriented places to live in. Now I can’t imagine Italy not being a part of our lives, and the lives of our children and their children. Our connection here is so strong and we know it so well.” Yet she is never one to stay put in any one place for too long. “We’re explorers, constantly travelling, always finding something new. You know, we don’t just sit by the pool,” she laughs.
Casa Olivetta can be rented through casaolivetta.com
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