La Dolce Vita

Reportage 13595296 | © living4media / Narratives / Sanderson, Robert | 36 images

A carpet of pink bougainvillea covers the rock face, against which James and Anna Brown’s L shaped villa was built, producing a sweet smelling shade for the courtyard and terraces overlooking the sea. For this architectural gem, the plateau site was literally blasted out of the rocks by James’s grandfather, a Norwegian entrepreneur and ship owner.‘The villa was the result of my grand father’s visionary enterprise, and in those days, it was considered an extraordinary engineering feat, ’ says James. ‘Apparently it was originally sketched out on the back on a paper napkin at a local restaurant, with the help of architect Matteo D’Agostino and his partner and designer Ernestino Carmon. The stone blasted out of the rocks was used to fill in and create a flat shelf on which the house now sits. Apart from the stones, donkeys delivered all the other building materials. There was no road, and even to this day, the house ‘s only access is on foot.’