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"View Slideshow\n\nThe series of fortunate events that led Steven Harris and Lucien Rees Roberts to an island off the Dalmatian coast started with disenchantment. Rees Roberts's parents, both painters, had vacationed on the Catalan coast, in Cadaqu\u00E9s, for more than 50 years, at first in bohemian solitude. But the crowds started coming and never stopped, and Rees Roberts, a designer who is also a painter, decided to move on to find the solitude lost.\n\nAn architect of Croatian descent happened to be working in Harris's architectural office, Steven Harris Architects, and after returning from visiting his grandfather there, he brought tales of unspoiled coastal beauty. Harris and Rees Roberts were soon on a plane. By coincidence, a client passed along the number of a preservationist specializing in the Adriatic, and she in turn put the New Yorkers in touch with a local contact, who acted as their guide.\n\nThey came, they saw, they bought and restored a charming stone cottage.\n\nBut one summer day, walking on a promontory near the village, Rees Roberts chanced into a conversation with a young couple. They invited him in for coffee. A modest gate in a nondescript fence opened onto the commanding grandeur of a panorama that was equal parts hills and azure. \"You could see down to the village and across the water to the islands and mainland,\" recalls Rees Roberts, whose firm, Rees Roberts + Partners, designs interiors and landscapes.\n\n\"Then the young man contacted me two months later,\" he says, delivering the punch line: \"His mother wanted to sell.\"\n\nUnexpectedly, a compound of four stone buildings facing a cinematic panorama fell into their laps. Rees Roberts and Harris, whose respective firms are located in the same Tribeca loft, collaborate on everything from architecture to interiors to landscape, and they sailed, undaunted, into the task of restoring and developing, long distance, the buildings and grounds.\n\nThe centerpiece of the compound was a two-story stone merchant's house that had bones, and only bones. Within the handsome, well-proportioned 15th-century shell, the original interior had deteriorated and needed considerable care.\n\nHarris and Rees Roberts could see past the challenges inside to the overall potential, and the pair embarked on an extensive restoration that became, for a year, the village's favorite topic of conversation. Sipping port down at the port, the townspeople enjoyed a ringside seat as all the construction materials and furniture arrived on the mainland ferry. Everything had to be hand-carried 156 steps up the hill to the site. The solitary donkey quit on the job.\n\nThe donkey is now free-range, and with the construction completed, she likes to linger outside the tall stone wall that fences the enclave. The gate opens to the same view that first stole Rees Roberts's breath, but the buildings have been rescued. \"Our strategy was to keep the shapes simple and direct, as though the house has always been there, untouched,\" says Harris. Over-restoration is always the latent risk of a preservationist's good intentions, and the designers purposely cultivated a sense of authenticity to sand off any varnish. They used handmade Tuscan terra-cotta roof and floor tiles and preserved and enhanced the stone walls.\n\nThat there was little left of the original interior to restore liberated the designers to create large, open spaces within the 1,500-square-foot shell. To capitalize on the view and breezes, they sited the living room on the second floor and placed the kitchen and dining room downstairs, with French doors opening onto the gardens. Throughout, they stripped wood paneling back to the stone walls and maintained the existing ceiling timbers.\n\nBut what truly sets the project apart is the sophistication of the furniture that was carried up those 156 steps. Pedigreed Modernist pieces such as Pierre Paulin's Ribbon chair and Jorge Zalszupin's Brazilian rosewood armchairs, with their lithe, gazellelike limbs, hold their place as futuristic sculpture. \"I set the Modern furniture in contrast to the old house,\" says Rees Roberts. \"The contemporary furniture underscores the house's sense of age. The furniture and the house explain each other.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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