In the Apulian countryside near Otranto, the late Umberto Riva restored Masseria La Lazzara — an 18th-century hunting lodge formerly known as Casino Marotta — with interventions so precisely calibrated they read as a long conversation with the building's own history.
Umberto Riva (1928–2023) was among the most consistently singular figures in Italian design and architecture — a practitioner who worked across scales from furniture to buildings and maintained throughout a quality of tactile intelligence that resisted classification. His furniture is in museum collections. His buildings are few and considered. Masseria La Lazzara, documented here in photographs by Alba Deangelis, is among the last major projects of his career, and it shows the full depth of his attentiveness to the existing.
The masseria stands in the open Apulian landscape between Otranto and the southern coast of the Salento peninsula — a terrain of dry stone walls, ancient olive groves, and the low white cubic architecture that has defined this part of Italy since the early modern period. The building itself is a large, cubic whitewashed farmhouse of considerable presence: tall, solid, its windows small and considered, its walls thick enough to maintain their own climate. As Casino Marotta it functioned as a hunting lodge in the 18th century; it arrived at Riva in a state of dereliction.
The restoration engages the building's past with care but without sentimentality. The main structure was gently restructured both aesthetically and logistically — the ground floor opened to emphasise the living space and kitchen; the upper floor arranged as private bedrooms and workspaces, furnished with pieces designed by Riva himself. Two new additions were made: a contemporary library, inserted as a volume that complements rather than competes with the restored fabric, and an independent polygonal studio for the owner — a separate small building connected to the main house by a garden that also separates the masseria from two new rental houses, likewise designed by Riva and occupying the landscape at a respectful distance.
What Deangelis's photographs convey most fully is the relationship between this restored building and the Apulian land that surrounds it. The white cubic mass, a single bare tree in the foreground, the dry grass and low stone walls receding to the horizon — it is a landscape that seems to have arranged itself around the building and vice versa, each lending the other its particular form of endurance. Riva's work here is quiet enough to allow that relationship its full authority.
