I would like to override the default umask and owner:group settings within certain directories only, without requiring root privileges, as that kind of defeats the purpose.

For example, when I touch a file in /var/www/ it becomes 0755 and owned by redsandro:redsandro.

I would like this to default to 0770 and redsandro:www-data for everything within /var/www/.

Maybe there's a better solution for this specific scenario. This seemed to be the only way to have both my non-root user and the webserver in full control over /var/www/. As the only user of this machine, I like the htdocs to be 'mine' without being root. Apache becomes fed up though when you take too much territory inside htdocs.

Here is a related question for the umask part where the answer is "no". But I am sure others have sought the same functionality, and I can imagine pwd based umask is available somehow just like git uses .git to store pwd independent settings that go up the directory-tree. Or down, I'm not sure if you call subdirectories up or down the tree. ;)