Capri has long been a byword for Mediterranean chic, its status as a see-and-be-seen party resort established in the first century B.C.E. by the island’s original celebrity second-home owner, Caesar Augustus. His successor, Tiberius, liked it so much he moved in full-time. After lying fallow for over a millennium following the fall of Rome, Capri was reborn as a destination for bohemian expats in the 19th century and as a playground for La Dolce Vita–era starlets in the 1950s and ’60s. Its glamorous reputation still draws the glitterati. Yet those who leave the boutiques and pastel-hued pizzerias behind and follow the mountain trails to the island’s south side will discover a more private enclave. Here, a Parisian émigré and his family have created a starkly contemporary home that is, in the words of its architect, “the antithesis of the popular image of Capri.”
This antithetical dwelling sits at the top of a steep footpath cut into the side of Monte Tuoro, on Capri’s southeast corner. The large 1930s villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea was split into six apartments after World War II, and the first floor has been transformed by Luciano Giorgi, a Milanese architect, into an austere space that rejects the traditional ornamentation of southern Italian design, a style typified, he says, by the exuberance of colored majolica pottery. Instead it pays homage to the island’s Villa San Michele, built around the turn of the 20th century in elegantly stark black and white. Giorgi redefined his clients’ 1,600-square-foot three-bedroom residence in white Carrara marble and the black lava stone common to southwest Italy, home to three still-smoldering volcanoes.
These contrasts between light and dark, seclusion and revelry, appeal to the apartment’s owner, Xavier Rougeaux, CEO of Valextra, the Italian luxury leather-goods brand. “If you’re looking for a place where you can rest, relax, enjoy beautiful views, but at the…