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Mediterranean View Villa

This villa for rent in Corsica once housed the family business, a thriving, beachfront surf shop, so its prime location with private access to the sea can’t be beat. Today, the shop’s former check-out counter is a sleek modern kitchen, and rooms that once housed stacks of colorful surfboards make up a trio of double bedrooms. Steps from the water, the cool Mediterranean-view villa covers two floors, with a contemporary, glass-enclosed living room upstairs offering access to the roof deck.

A surf shop-turned-beach house, this Mediterranean villa has been updated from its commercial days into a cool, contemporary waterfront home with a panoramic roof terrace and lots of operable glass. Redesigned by Parisian architect Vincent Leprince, it offers vistas out to historic Montecristo island, pristine whitewashed walls indoors and out, and laid-back, seafaring-styled furnishings indoors and on the partially-shaded pool terrace, looking out to the pines, palms, and bright blue sea.

Modern loft styling is the work of interior designer Eric Sanchez, with polished stone and concrete flooring, metal bannisters and wide sliding doors. Bedrooms are whitewashed and beachy, with wood furnishings, rattan and cane fixtures, and a muted, natural palette with an abundance of natural light.

AROUND

Located only meters from the Mediterranean, tucked in between leaning pines and tall shaggy palms, this villa for rent in Corsica offers privacy and seclusion yet easy access to the bustling port city of Bastia, some 30 kilometers north. Bastia’s ancient, picture-perfect citadel is one of the Mediterranean’s most iconic. 

The villa sits in the region of Haute-Corse (the island’s northeast), and its waterfront is unspoiled and wild, with grass, pines, and the island’s famed maquis, or aromatic shrubbery, separating it from the sea. Activities include watersports of every kind, hiking the serrated coastline, and driving up twisting roads that dead end in crumbling hilltop villages that seem lost in time. Bastia is a gateway to the Cap Corse peninsula, a particularly wild part of the island famed for its muscat wine, clifftop villages, and remote rocky inlets, with tiny, picturesque ports hidden amid the massive boulders and jutting shores.

LOCATION

Taglio-Isolaccio, Corsica, France. Nearest airport: Bastia (approximately 30km)

BEST TIME TO VISIT: May to September