Villas in Sardinia – Luxury Earth Houses

A vision born in the 1970s is fulfilled. Ferdinando Fagnola and PAT. together renew the idea that had given life to the villas nestled in the earth on the northeastern coast of Sardinia, near the Emerald coast. Conceived in the 1970s by Ferdinando Fagnola and Gianni Francione, the complex of villas nestled in the earth in a village close to the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, Italy has recently been the subject of a brilliant renovation project designed by Fagnola himself together with PAT. studio. The vitality, spatial qualities, environmental sensitivity and community spirit that inspired the project forty years ago are renewed, thus reviving a little-known episode of the best Italian architecture.

The complex of villas designed in the 1970s by architects Ferdinando Fagnola and Gianni Francione overlooks the north-east coast of Sardinia. A mimetic project but one with a resolute attitude, guided by the desire to integrate the built environment into the natural environment, and for this reason unstructured and distributed in a series of rigorous volumes that slit the ground like wedges, generating an open series of relationships and spaces. The villas tend to disappear into nature and blend into the vegetation.

Already in their first realization, interpreters of the most original conceptions and the best environmental sensibilities of that late seventies, the volumes were designed to establish an almost mimetic relationship with nature, which distanced itself from the Mediterranean vernacular that was popular in the area. For Ferdinando Fagnola, the complex had to conceal itself rather than appear. The buildings thus emerge from the ground and their mysterious and severe forms are designed to relate to space and the orography of the ground.

 Materials provided by Ferdinando Fagnola and PAT.
Photo: © Pino dell’Aquila

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