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"View Slideshow\n\nThere are degrees to everything. If you want to get away from it all, you can choose a rugged island in the middle of the Mediterranean\u2014like Corsica, with its jagged coastline of creeks and its bristling mountainous backbone of near impenetrable forests. Then if you really want to get away, you take one more decisive step and push off from that craggy coast on your own boat for a small, exclusive island like\u2014well, there's nothing quite like Cavallo, a strip of sculptural rock and flowering scrub lost in the waves beyond Corsica's southern tip.\n\nHaving sailed there and fallen in love with Cavallo's strange wilderness bolted between the Mediterranean sea and sky, you can go the whole way\u2014you find a stretch of deserted beach with a breathtaking view of the water and wonder how you could live there in direct contact with nature. What you need is not a house but a kind of sanctuary, a refuge that allows you to participate in the constant drama of sun and wind while protecting you from the threats of a mercurial ocean.\n\n\"We had a wonderful jumble of rocks overlooking the sea. We had to get the rocks on our side, so I incorporated them into the house.\"\n\nWith both a father and a grandfather who made their mark as unconventional architects, Savin Cou\u00EBlle has an instinct about such things. He was born and brought up in France, and as a boy he loved nothing more than making hiding places in the caves near his home. And later, having moved to Sardinia, where his father was instrumental in developing the Costa Smeralda's new resorts, Cou\u00EBlle became fascinated by the island's prehistoric stone towers, called nuraghi, and particularly admired their cool, dark interiors and hidden recesses linked by inner staircases. Built of great blocks of local stone, the ancient towers had long ago merged with the surrounding countryside.\n\nThat fascination inspired his design of a new house on Cavallo. \"For me, buildings only work if they fit so naturally into the landscape that they become almost invisible,\" Cou\u00EBlle explains. \"We had a wonderful jumble of rocks overlooking the sea. I knew we had to get the rocks on our side, so I incorporated them, turning them into the vaults of the new house by joining them together with wood and plaster.\" Once he had the shell, Cou\u00EBlle was able to shape the interiors spontaneously. \"A wall suggests a room, one room suggests another, and so on,\" he says. \"I am a very instinctive architect. I make plans, but I change things as I go along. I work with my hands, molding the walls and the space like a sculptor. And I always use local materials.\"\n\nCou\u00EBlle also took advantage of the house's site and its proximity to the sea. He strategically placed windows and openings to allow natural light to flow into the house and make it \"a kind of extension of the sea, like a harbor\u2014invaded by water yet safe from it,\" he says.\n\nThe owners of this choice outpost on the Mediterranean had first chanced on the island in their yacht, then found out that Cou\u00EBlle had built several sophisticatedly simple residences on Cavallo and Sardinia. \"When clients come to me, I like to live with them for a while and find out who they are, what interests them most and what their close friends are like,\" Cou\u00EBlle explains. \"I want them to be happy in the houses I build for them.\" The architect brought in a team of artisans who have worked with him over the years, and they created windows, staircases and doors to his specifications.\n\n\"The essential thing is simplicity,\" Cou\u00EBlle stresses. \"A house like this is like a luxury cave. If it gets too hot, you have rooms that are cool. If it gets cold, you can light a fire. The house is part of nature but protected.\"\n\nCou\u00EBlle brought that concept of simplicity to the interiors as well. \"Why would you need any interior decoration?\" he says. \"You can have some simple furniture, if you like, with a few local fabrics as coverings. Then you have everything you could possibly need in your cave, and you can give yourself over to the greatest luxury of all: to sit in silence, relaxed and secure, watching the light on the water and listening to the waves breaking at your feet.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/couelle-article-102006>