The first idea, as always, was the obvious one: renovate part of the villa and get four rooms out of it. It would have been simpler, cheaper, and nobody would have objected.
Then we counted the trees.
Seven thousand square metres do not move
The garden of Villa Pastore Galderio is a working orchard, not a decorative lawn: lemons, oranges, peaches, plums, hazel and century-old olive trees. Building anything permanent inside it would have meant felling, digging, pouring concrete. And once done, there is no going back.
The right question was not “where do we build”, but “how do we avoid building”.
What a bubble room actually does
A dome is set down. It has no foundations, no load-bearing walls, and asks nothing of the ground. Services run underground along existing paths. The day we took it all away, the garden would be exactly as it was the week before.
There is a side effect we had not predicted: sleeping inside a transparent dome changes your relationship with the place. You do not look at the garden through a window — you are inside it.