A Binishell on the Sardinian coast: Dante Bini's Piccola Cupola for sale

Costa Paradiso resists domestication: rust-red granite cliffs, maquis dense with juniper and lentisk, an uncompromising quality of light. It is here that Dante Bini designed the Piccola Cupola, the smaller twin of the dome that Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti chose as their private retreat. Bini patented the Binishell system in the 1960s: pneumatic balloons coated in reinforced concrete, inflated and then deflated to leave behind organic shell structures suspended between technological utopianism and Mediterranean archaism. The Piccola Cupola resists easy categorisation. The living area opens onto the terrace with a sense of inevitability, the sea at the horizon functioning not as backdrop but as spatial boundary. Local granite, handmade ceramic tilework and salvaged timber appear throughout in easy conversation with contemporary finishes. The sleeping quarters comprise a double room and a twin, each with its own bathroom; to the rear of the villa, reached along a path of helichrysum, rosemary and lavender, two further semi-subterranean rooms with bathrooms extend the accommodation quietly into the hillside. Two short paths wind through the fragrant scrubland to a pool set into the rock as though it had always been there. An architecture at once unmistakable and deferential to the raw Mediterranean beauty that surrounds it, combined with the seclusion and quiet of Costa Paradiso, makes this a property of rare and lasting intensity. A property of this kind exceeds description. It is best understood by living in it.