A Loudoun County couple recently purchased a vacation home in Italy — and now their experience is being featured on an episode of the TV show “House Hunters International.”
Ashley and Dario Campolattaro — who live in Ashburn’s Brambleton neighborhood — had long dreamed of owning a home in Italy. Dario’s heritage is all Italian with his father being from Naples and his mother from Trieste.
During the pandemic, the Campolattaros binged lots of television — including “House Hunters International” which airs on the HGTV cable network. The show follows people as they search for and ultimately purchase a home overseas.
As the Campolattaros began their search, they reached out to the producers at the show on a lark and submitted an application.
As savvy reality show watchers know, not everything you see on a show like “House Hunters International” is 100 percent real.
In the case of “House Hunters,” the buyers have usually already purchased their home before they are chosen to be featured on the show. It would be a huge waste of time and resources to follow a family through the process only to have the deal fall through.
The Campolattaros ultimately purchased a home in Lucca, Italy not far from Pisa in the country’s Tuscany region. And they were ultimately chosen to be featured on “House Hunters” as well.
“We were impressed by how the House Hunters team seemed interested in translating our real-life house-hunt into an episode that depicted our motivations, thought process and the types of properties we had explored,” Ashely Campolattaro wrote in a family blog posting.
Filming ultimately took place this past April and now the show is debuting on HGTV tonight — Tuesday, November 26 — at 10 p.m.
The Brambleton couple hasn’t seen the finished show yet — and they are bracing themselves. “Hopefully we don’t come across as annoying or boring,” wrote Ashley Campolattaro. “If you’ve watched the show, you know there’s typically a good cop/bad cop formula, so chances are one of us will be the annoying one. I’m anticipating cringing through the entire thing.”