Jacques Couëlle's Villas become the Costa Smeralda® Museum

The legacy of the visionary French architect lives on in a new cultural hub

In the early 1960s, Porto Cervo began to take shape with a then-unconventional goal: to create an international luxury destination without betraying the pristine landscape of northeastern Sardinia. For this reason, in 1962, the Consortium established an Architecture Committee, calling upon Jacques Couëlle, alongside figures such as Luigi Vietti and Michele Busiri Vici.

Dubbed ‘an-architect’ by Prévert, Couëlle arrived in Sardinia with a vision that drew on sculpture, archaeology, botany, and anatomy: to build according to the laws of nature. After his experience in Castellaras-le-Neuf on the Bay of Cannes, he brought to northeastern Sardinia an organic language of curved walls, irregular volumes, natural materials, and spaces conceived in relation to the terrain, the sun, the wind, and the movements of those who would inhabit them. His first project, the Hotel Cala di Volpe, completed in 1963 with his son Savin, was destined to define the style of this part of the island.

Ten years, and many projects later, Couëlle pushed his research further with Villa La Grotta. He didn’t simply design a house, he shaped it as an habitable sculpture, resembling a rock, a shell, a sleeping animal. A mysterious and living building, in which nature becomes a space for man.

The Jacques Couëlle Villas in Monti Mannu, Abbiadori have become public property and are scheduled to become the future Museo Costa Smeralda®. The complex, features organic architecture created in the 1960s by French master Jacques Couëlle. The spaces will be redeveloped with exhibition areas, educational workshops, meeting rooms, a bookshop, and a café, breathing new life into a place that is a symbol of Arzachena’s landscape and identity.