Marble Beach

The bay is near-circular, the water turquoise over pale rock, a crescent of grey-white sand at its head, the hills folding steeply down on both sides in the spare, sun-bleached vocabulary of the Aegean interior — low maquis, grey schist, the occasional boat at anchor in the middle of the cove and nothing else between the water and the ridge. The land that surrounds it — 295,000 sqm of south-west-facing hillside, divided into five building sites, each with its own section of shoreline — is offer...