Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, the in-demand designers behind architecture firm Studio KO, bring their instinct for balance and sophistication to the ruggedly beautiful landscape of Corsica.
Working with skilled local craftspeople, the couple restored the structure with a sensitivity to its history, using the region’s characteristic rough-edged slate tiles for the roof, and carefully copying the dimensions of a neighbor’s original chimneypiece to replace a later addition. They even instructed their painters to leave small unpainted “windows” to reveal the original nineteenth-century wall colors in a brace of guest rooms, a playful homage to a similar effect they had seen when they stayed at the Villa Medici in Rome. The house also reflects their keen eye for deft and unobtrusive contemporary interventions. “We wanted it to be very fresh, light, and clean,” says Marty, so they painted the hexagonal terra-cotta tommette tiles on the second floor a pale gray, and selected vast glazed windows to replace the solid stable doors on the ground floor. Meanwhile, their friend the landscape architect Arnaud Casaus fashioned a pocket Eden in the former junkyard, now a garden of darting lizards, planted in a harmony of soft mauve-blues with agapanthus, Thunbergia, Vitex agnus-castus, plumbago, and morning glory. On balmy days meals of such local delicacies as a filetta, a potent, dense cheese; wild-boar saucisson; cedrat and bramble jams; and chestnut cake are served alfresco, on a raised terrace crowned with a canopy covered in split reeds, inspired by one they’d seen at Marella Agnelli’s home in Corsica and reinterpreted in her home in Marrakech—one of the jewels in their enviable portfolio.
The two established their company, Studio KO, four years after they first met, and attribute their astonishing early success to the serendipitous choice of Morocco as the destination for their first summer holiday together. Fournier’s aunt has a house in Fez, and his father was born in Tunisia. “So there is something about Arabic culture in my family,” he explains of their choice at the time. They stayed in a small guesthouse in the Marrakech medina and planned an adventure that took them from the deserts of Morocco’s deep south to Mediterranean-breezed Tangier in the north. By the end of their odyssey, the country was in their blood.
Studio KO now has residential and commercial projects as far afield as Los Angeles, Gabon, where they are building an eco hotel, and London, where they joined André Balazs’s team to create his see-and-be-seen hotel the Chiltern Firehouse. “They have an integrity and a sophistication that reminds me of [Christian] Liaigre,” notes Balazs, “with a range of interests that goes from architecture to fabrics.” Their work has also taken them back to their beloved Corsica. Here they have recently completed a villa on the island’s southern tip near Porto-Vecchio, a structure of local granite that appears like an ancient walled fortress growing out of the maquis. With its black terrazzo floors, and pocket doors that disappear into the thick walls in the balmy summers, “it’s very Corsican,” says Marty. “It echoes well the roughness,” adds Fournier, “the intensity of the Corsican landscape.”
