Our story begins in a 7th floor apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan where, at a dinner, we met for the first time. Young and full of ideas – and barely speaking each others’ languages – we launched into a life together. From there, we tried Brooklyn, Milan and Tuscany before settling in 2015 on the rough and undeveloped corner of Sulcis for this idealistic and endlessly challenging project.
We were both city kids, but we had begun to feel that the city was giving us less than it was taking from us. Ivano had grown up spending summers with his family in Sulcis and had introduced me to this wild and singular world that seemed lost in time. And it seemed to be a perfect fit – we wanted to use our creative backgrounds to give back to a community in some way, and Sulcis needed some affection from the outside world.
So in 2015 we made the jump and moved to the island. We had spent many years driving down backroads, searching out little pockets of history and unexplored landscapes, running into herds of sheep, and hearing the stories of the people whose families had populated the abandoned towns that we sought out. During one of these trips, we happened upon the valley that would become Luxi Bia, and we were determined to transform it into what it is today.
Many years later, we have lived through endless phases – the barren challenge of newly finished construction sites, the hope that lies in grafting old olive trees to life again, the folly of running a design company from rural Sardinia – and we can now see the results of our actions. Every plant we have planted and pruned and treated and watered, every stone wall restored or built from scratch, every micro-habitat that has created itself as nature takes our work into its own hands. This place is, in the end, a mix of everything we have ever been – radical, ridiculous, devoted, obsessive, independent.