Looking Around

An Ode to Puglia: Discovering Vista Ostuni

Vista Ostuni has transformed a dormant 14th-century Manifattura Tabacchi near the Città Bianca into one of southern Italy's most compelling new luxury addresses. Designed by studio RMA Roberto Murgia Architetto with landscapes by Erik Dhont, it is a project that draws every one of its design decisions — materials, craftsmen, palette, and proportion — directly from the land it sits on, and the result is a benchmark for what heritage hospitality can look like when restraint and place-knowledge guide every move.

When the Passera family first set eyes on the former Manifattura Tabacchi in Ostuni, the building had been closed since 1968. What they saw was not a ruin but a blueprint — and Vista Ostuni, which opened in July 2025, is one of the most considered pieces of hospitality architecture to emerge from southern Italy in recent memory.

Entrusted to Milan-based studio RMA Roberto Murgia Architetto, the project is governed by a single idea: that a building this historically layered demands materials and craftsmen drawn entirely from the same soil.

Local stone — including Trani marble and breccia Sant'Antonio — lines floors and terraces; ceilings soar to seven meters, several executed in the regional "volta a schifo" arch technique that exists virtually nowhere else; blacksmiths forged replacements for original cast-iron balustrade elements from hand-made molds; ceramics came from nearby Grottaglie. The interior feels not designed so much as patiently remembered.

The 28 rooms and suites carry that philosophy into the most private spaces, where walls nearly two meters thick are transformed into deep window niches fitted with cocoon seats — soft oases of linen and local textile suspended between ancient stonework and sweeping views of olive groves or the White City beyond.

Erik Dhont's three-hectare gardens extend the same logic outward: conceived as a "translucent garden," they blur the boundary between architecture and landscape so completely that it becomes genuinely difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. Vista Ostuni ultimately makes a powerful case that the most compelling luxury design isn't about imposition — it's about revelation.