The Home of Photosynthesis

Rising 150 metres over the cramped, warren-like streets of Naples, it's easy to see why the Bourbon kings picked Capodimonte Hill as the location of their new hunting-lodge-slash-palace. From here you can see all the way east to the scooped-out shadow-peak of Mount Vesuvius, or south to the sparkling Gulf of Naples and distant Capris. When the early morning sun hits the city, Capodimonte Hill gets first dibs.

The gardens around Capodimonte are overgrown with orange and lemon trees, and in the evening twilight the smell of citrus floats through the district, carried gently on the breeze. It was up here in 1738, on top of Capodimonte, that King Charles VII of Naples and Sicily built his Royal Palace, now a museum. The construction took over a century. Volcanic piperno rock was lugged all the way from quarries in Pianura, west of the city, and manicured gardens and hunting grounds, the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, sprouted on the hill.

But step away from the gardens and museums for a second – around a corner, down a crumbling side street, up several flights of nondescript stairs, through a door, and you'll find the light-filled apartment of architects and couple, Julie Nebout and Giuseppe Punzo – founders of the Italian design studio La Fotosintesi.

"We needed a home in Naples," Giuseppe says. "That's how the project began. Set on an old staircase, in a hilly area surrounded by gardens – it's a stark contrast to the bustling life of the city.

"We wanted to rediscover the beauty of old Neapolitan houses: the lofty ceilings, the dramatic light flooding the spaces, the traditional materials like vintage ceramics and tuff stone walls."

The studio name – fotosintesi is Italian for photosynthesis – came about one appropriately sunny morning as Julie and Giuseppe were sitting on the balcony of their previous Neapolitan apartment. After two years in Paris, trapped in claustrophobic lockdowns, Naples felt like a breath of fresh air. Literally. The winds around this region are famous, part of local folklore: the warm scirocco, carried up from the Sahara, which makes the air feel heavy and people act funny; the icy grecale, blowing down from Greece; and the north-westerly maestrale, which often appears after storms, washing the sky clear and revealing the looming bulk of Mount Vesuvius.

On this day, however, both the sun and the espresso were strong and hot.

"One morning we were sitting on the balcony of our apartment, enjoying a radiant sunny day and good coffee," Julie says. "After all that time in lockdowns, we joked that we were literally doing our photosynthesis. We loved the idea, and we told ourselves that if we ever started an agency together, that would be the name."

The couple began hunting around for a more permanent base of operations, somewhere they could live, but also run the studio. Their search eventually led to Capodimonte and the historic Vico Paradisiello complex (translation: paradise), where they found a pint-sized apartment for sale. Space: small. View: to die for.

Measuring just 60 square metres, Julie and Giuseppe’s ‘paradise’ is proof that creativity thrives on limitations, and you don't need a big space to accommodate big ideas. When the couple moved in, their first task was stripping back decades of, shall we say, ‘courageous’ design choices, revealing bare bones and a wonderfully un-blank slate.

"The biggest design challenge was bringing back the apartment's historical elements," Giuseppe says.

"Over the years, various modifications had removed or concealed the original features. For example, we rediscovered the old colour palettes hidden behind layers of wallpaper. The dominant colours in the living room and bedroom are actually the original ones, which we then paired with contemporary elements to create a balanced contrast." More on this art form later.

It wasn’t an easy build. Julie and Giuseppe were drawn to the apartment’s cavernous Neapolitan ceilings and sweeping vista – from the living room, you can literally turn your head and see Mount Vesuvius. But the tiny floor plan required five re-drafts to get right, until, as Julie says, “every square centimetre was optimised”.

That included an ingenious chartreuse mezzanine level, perched above the kitchen, which now functions as the couple's home-office-slash-design-studio. If you can't build outwards, build upwards, right? Further challenges came in the shape of the building's ancient, narrow stairs, which made transporting materials a real pain. "The construction company actually wanted to use a donkey to carry everything up here," Giuseppe laughs.

But when Julie and Giuseppe started stripping back layers, digging through the strata like archaeologists in the Quarry of Altamura, they discovered buried treasure. Some of the original Vietri floor tiles were still there, beautifully preserved, as were the walls, hewn from volcanic tuff rock.

"We love the entrance in particular," Julie says, "with its vaulted ceiling, generous size, and just its sheer volume. It creates a sense of space as soon as you step into the apartment.

"The bedroom is another highlight, especially in the morning. During the renovation we actually discovered a heart carved into the wall, underneath the wallpaper. It's a symbol that was traditionally used to bring luck and protection to the inhabitants, so we decided to leave it in place."

Julie and Giuseppe planned their new home with care. Given their studio name, it's no surprise they wanted light to be a central feature, energising every room with shafts of gold. But the broader philosophy was to somehow mash classical Neapolitan design with modern materials: playful peach stairs leading up to the mezzanine, resin flooring, sculptural glass tables, and a galley kitchen decked out in mod-black and stainless steel.

The end result is what you might call 'eclectic', but not in a scattershot, throw-stuff-and-see-what-sticks sort of way. Julie calls it "joyfully eclectic" in that every single piece sparks joy, and their collective joy-sparking powers are enhanced by proximity to one another. Even when the designs don't match.

And it works, too. Despite representing 200-odd years of design, every element somehow flows together into a cohesive mishmash of shapes, styles and textures. Shades of red, grey, green and yellow dominate the space. Some walls are painted and rendered, others are left bare, or deliberately half-finished. It's Old Italy meets New, vintage chic meets 60s modernism, all bathed in that wonderfully soft, diffused Naples light.

Naples is a beautiful yet fragile city, built in layers – a millennia- old place where different eras coexist in what seems like chaos. We brought that same spirit into the project by respecting the existing layers of the space.

Here's a typical day inside Julie and Giuseppe's apartment. It starts with Giuseppe making coffee and bringing it to Julie in bed. The shutters are thrown back and light spills into the room. Then it's work time. Julie heads up the narrow stairs to the mezzanine and Giuseppe heads to the construction site to check progress on the latest build.

The couple are a good team: Julie thrives on design, while Giuseppe handles execution.

Lunch is a typical Neapolitan snack, maybe pasta and chickpeas, followed by meetings all afternoon. At dusk, as the setting sun turns Vesuvius purple, the couple go out for dinner, or stay home and watch a movie.

"Giuseppe is definitely the clean freak," Julie laughs. "He also has a great sense of humor and is very sensible and creative. But he's more cynical, discreet and introverted than I am."

"Yeah, Julie is definitely the fun and creative one," Giuseppe says. "I'm much more of a perfectionist. We usually decide everything together, although Julie has more control over design decisions."

With their own home, the couple decided to stick with French or local Italian designers, where possible. They've also picked pieces you wouldn't necessarily expect. The cushions and upholstery, for example, are from In Casa by Paboy – a Naples-based collective founded by Gambian craftsman and designer Paboy Bojang, which offers safe work for refugees and migrants. Julie's always been a big fan of Charlotte Perriand, Carlo Scarpa and Tobia Scarpa – all that functional elegance and material mastery – whereas Giuseppe loves the pure lines of Italian rationalism. Think Giuseppe Terragni, or the Swiss-born Mario Botta.

Julie says they've made a conscious effort not to "give in to trends", but rather fill the space with stuff they like, both vintage and modern, in order to generate "unexpected encounters". Which is actually pretty good advice for us all. The whole apartment is really a masterclass in balancing contrasts, which Giuseppe admits is sometimes harder than it looks.

"All the elements need to be in harmony with each other; even the contrast must be harmonious. If there's a clear contrast, then we highlight it in a way that draws attention to that particular point. There's no secret – it's all about achieving harmony between the elements."

How do you know when your clashing elements are “in harmony” and when they’re just plain clashing? Well, that comes with experience, and maybe surrounding yourself with some brutally honest friends.But it also helps to have a 'look', or even a feeling, in mind. Julie says every La Fotosintesi job aims to create an interior that "already feels lived in". Not a sterile showcase or wanky thought experiment, but a living, breathing, crumb-strewn world. A home, in other words, not just a house.

"That's what I love about this space," she says. "It evolves throughout the day. It feels alive. My favourite moment is in the morning, when it's bathed in light, offering a breathtaking view of the gardens full of lemon trees, Mount Vesuvius, Naples and the sea.

"The volumes, the colours – I love everything about this space. It's where our thoughts and souls find peace."