HOUSE-HUNTING STARS
By Chris Wadsworth
Lots of people have probably watched the show “House Hunters International” on HGTV. Each episode, an individual or a couple travels to some exotic overseas locale and works with a local real estate agent, touring three homes before settling on one to buy to begin their lives as expatriates.
The show is a fantasy for many people – and half the fun as a viewer is deciding which home you would buy yourself and then guessing which home the couple will ultimately choose.
Well, it wasn’t just a fantasy for one Ashburn couple. Ashley and Dario Campolattaro – who live in Brambleton – recently appeared on the show as they hunted for the perfect second home in Italy.
“My parents immigrated [from Italy] to the United States in the mid-’60s. All my aunts, uncles and cousins and my grandparents lived in Italy, and I spent a lot of time going back to Italy as a child,” Dario said. “When Ash and I got married, we started traveling to Italy – we were just drawn to spending more time there and eventually exposing our kids to the heritage and the culture.”
The Campolattaros had always dreamed of owning a home there, and with their three boys grown and launched they decided the time was right. Fans of the HGTV show, they reached out to producers on a lark and submitted an application.
“It was Covid, and we were just spending a lot of time bingeing the show and thinking about traveling that we couldn’t do. We thought wouldn’t it be funny if we did that,” Ashley said. “And then we did, and they responded. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Now comes time for some hard truths. If you think everything you see on TV is 100% real, we have some news for you.
In the case of “House Hunters International,” by the time the production crews start filming, the homebuyers have already bought their home. In fact, they complete the purchase before they are even selected to be on the show.
Think about it this way – it would be a huge waste of time and resources to follow a family through the house-hunting process only to have the deal fall through.
“A lot of things can go sideways,” Ashley said.
Fortunately for the Campolattaros, they found a home they loved in the town of Lucca, Italy (population 89,000), not far from Pisa in the country’s Tuscany region.
And they were ultimately chosen to be featured on “House Hunters” as well.
“It was a bit like, ‘Oh, s—t. What did we get ourselves into, being on TV?’ The cringey-ness of what this could be like,” Dario said with a laugh. “It’s outside our character, but we decided it would memorialize this amazing experience of buying a house in Italy.”
Ashley said the couple did a lot of Zoom calls with producers to talk about the process of buying the home.
“They are looking for sources of conflict. If you agree on everything, that’s kind of boring,” she added. “Oftentimes, there’s a good cop and a bad cop, and I was thinking I didn’t want to be the bad cop.”
The couple closed on their home in Lucca in March 2023, but the filming for the show didn’t occur until April 2024. With camera crews in tow, the Campolattaros toured the home they had already purchased, along with two others.
“The director was really good at what he was doing,” Ashley said. “He would stand at the side of the camera and ask us leading questions to get us talking. Everything we said had to be said three times, because they only had one camera, but they wanted to shoot it from three different angles.”
The Campolattaros were paid $2,000 for their appearance, and the finished episode debuted on HGTV in November. Lots of their Ashburn friends and neighbors tuned in.
“It’s not often you get to watch good friends on national TV,” said Angela Fuentes, an Ashburn resident and longtime friend of the Campolattaros. “[Ashley and I] already knew that they portray the couples with differing opinions. They made Dario the carefree, optimistic spouse and Ashley the more conservative, practical one, which was a funny, slightly exaggerated take on their real-life personalities.”
Now that the dust has settled from their brush with fame, the Campolattaros are starting to enjoy leading their dual lives, split between Ashburn and Italy. They love riding their bikes around Lucca and strolling along atop the ancient walls of the historic city, and they are starting to make a circle of friends there as well. They also have the home listed on Airbnb and rent it out when they are back in the states.
And as for the moment in the TV spotlight, it was a lot of rigamarole, and four long days of eight-hour shoots, but they say it was worth it.
“Now that it’s behind us, it’s been great being able to share this with other people and having friends razzing me at work,” Dario said. “It’s fun to look back on it.”