The project also stems from the dialogue with local artisans, artists of the material who have been able to give life and richness to the local granite, making it the true protagonist", say Massimo Alvisi and Junko Kirimoto, founders of the Rome-based studio Alvisi Kirimoto.

Their synthesis contains the most hidden meanings of the intervention they recently completed in Porto Rotondo, one of the most exclusive destinations in Sardinia.

Alvisi Kirimoto have interpreted the theme of Sardinian architecture with which professionals of the caliber of Jacques Couëlle, Luigi Vietti, Michele Busiri Vici have confronted themselves, each in their own way, through a contemporary language immune from vernacular accents and devoid of adherence to pre-established schemes, giving value to the natural environment of reference as the very essence of the built.

Nestled in the silent hilly landscape of Gallura and surrounded by Mediterranean scrub, the high-profile tailored villa stands on two hectares of land gently sloping towards the sea, in a privileged panorama of the Golfo degli Aranci.

It was generated by the transformation of three different buildings fragmented from each other that took on the unitary character of three low buildings separated and joined at different levels by the garden that surrounds them, an inseparable part of the entire project.

“The impossibility of modifying the profiles of the pre-existing volumes, due to landscape constraints, made it necessary to rethink their relationship,” explain the designers. Therefore, following the contour lines of the site, a staircase in yellow San Giacomo granite winds along like a promenade from the highest point of the lot, in a succession of soft and sinuous lines up to the central square, around which the volumes converge.

The composition integrates a system of terraces facing the sea together with the swimming pools, one of which is an infinity pool and the other has a hydromassage, echoing the transposition of a Mediterranean village into a private dimension: the square as a meeting place in the shade of a majestic carob tree, the petal-shaped green bands that alternate restored trees and new native vegetation, the connective tissue between the buildings.

The main one hosts the living areas in a continuum – living room, dining room and kitchen – and in a secluded corner of the west elevation the glass box that contains the access staircase to the new basement level reserved for the playroom and the technical rooms. The other two house the sleeping and service areas.

And if the architecture changes register, becoming orthogonality in the dry and essential lines of the buildings, the recurring material-chromatic palette, always dominated by the yellow granite of San Giacomo combined with the marble of Orosei, the iroko wood, the burnished brass and the natural lime plaster, gives voice to the new life of the building in a synthetic and coherent way in the spatial perception.

The laying of the blocks of natural split stone without joints, entrusted to talented local hands, has transformed the walls into imposing and sophisticated surfaces: a theory of walls and partitions vibrant in the sunlight, thanks to the generous windows with burnished brass book-shaped frames of extremely small section, which cut out the elevations opening views of the square and the terraces overlooking the sea in the living areas and towards the garden in the bedrooms.

The use of Orosei marble for the flooring, both inside and outside, further dissolves the concept of threshold, giving fluidity and lightness to the domestic landscape.

Then in the main volume rethought as a unicum serving the living areas, with a pace dictated by four parallel partitions oriented in an east-west direction, the unexpected twist.

The four-pitched wooden ceilings reveal a particular structure that also becomes a suggestive texture with a decorative effect in its contemporary image. “It is made up of four Duo beams in iroko wood, with central and lateral nodes resolved with a metal element,” explain the designers.