- LOCATION VILLA MARTINE, COSTA SMERALDA
- PROJECT STUDIO PÉ
- CONSTRUCTION TATTI COSTRUZIONI PORTO CERVO
- OUTFITS MISSONI
- PHOTOGRAPHER TIZIANO CANU
- STYLIST YLENIA FESTA
- MODEL LAUREN
- HAIR & MAKE-UP ROBERTA MASIA
- SET ASSISTANT ANDREA POLI
The tourist architecture lining the coasts of Italy – and the Mediterranean, and the world – tends to be “oriented”, in the sense that one can clearly recognise a front, facing the sea, and a back, looking towards the hinterland. The front almost always features large windows to establish a panoramic, immediate and exclusive relationship with the marine horizon.

The reasoning behind this habitual layout is easy to understand, being both geo-morphological – the coast slopes towards the water, suggesting a privileged view from its structures – and socio-cultural – holidaymakers want to see the sea, which they identify as the most precious element of the place where they elect to spend their vacation time. Precisely in contrast to this general rule, it is interesting to note how some eminent architectural designs try to establish a more complex, less distinct relationship with the landscape that surrounds them.

Take for example Villa Martine, perched on the rocky heights of Baja Sardinia. It is the classic example of a holiday home that, due to its scale and complexity, could be better described as a village. A coastal village with its volumes and voids, its buildings of varied shapes and sizes – the main house, the two annexes, the guest apartment – and its “public”, or rather communal spaces, which are the terraces and especially the pools with their respective surrounds. The design of Villa Martine employs many of the typical strategies used to integrate architecture into the coastal landscape, in a contemporary key: the positioning of the volumes follows the slope of the land, the stone that covers them recalls the shades and textures of the surrounding boulders – which have been left in place, directly dictating the layout of the open-air spaces.

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Moving through Villa Martine, its interiors and exteriors, is like entering a hybrid landscape, at once natural and anthropic in all of its parts. Sections of rock emerge from the abstract geometries of the building – even in the bedrooms – while platforms and stairways of local stone or teak wind between the granite masses, moulding organic forms into manufactured, habitable surfaces. The entranceways to the villa and parts of much of the flooring reproduce the texture and contours of its boulders, while household objects – furniture, pieces of art, plants – decorate the open air spaces as if they were rooms in their own right. The softened echoes of a wild landscape and the decadent accessories of summer hedonism are juxtaposed on a single stage devoted to beach life, which flows both inside and outside the villa.

Close but not in immediate proximity, the sea certainly exists as a fixed background and fundamental reference point, but Villa Martine is a device that multiplies perspectives and views. The houses of this particular hamlet overlook the central piazza of stone and water, and observe each other across it. The terraces glimpse each other and at times retreat thanks to the differences in height that divide them, while openings amidst the boulders frame fragments of architecture. Above all, the large glass panels that illuminate the interior are sometimes panoramic, sometimes immediately faced with vegetation or rock.

Powerful and prehistoric, concise but also rich in infinite variations and details, the rocks themselves become miniature landscapes, in vitro and on display, incredibly close yet out of reach.