SEAGRASS HOUSE BY WELSH AND MAJOR

The story goes that Curzio Malaparte, standing with a visitor before his house, looked about the vertiginous rocky cliffs fortifying the island of Capri against the Tyrrhenian Sea and explained that the house, Casa Malaparte, was already here; his role was simply to design the scenery.

I can’t help thinking about this surreal inversion while sitting at the table, eating chocolate cake, with the owner and architects of Seagrass House, perched on the rocky incline of a north-facing gully in perfect isolation at the southern end of Tathra Beach.

Of course, back in 1942, Malaparte was being rambunctiously provocative