IV · Purpose
It began with two friends, an olive grove, and the radical idea of doing nothing.
ZoMa House started as a calling, not a business plan. This page explains where it came from, what we believe, and why the residency doesn't end when the month does.
Genesis · 2023
An accidental month in Cuglieri.
In 2023, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Tara Roberts came to Cuglieri to write her memoir Written in the Waters — the story of her journey documenting divers searching for slave shipwrecks across the Atlantic. Her friend Dani Matielo, then Director of Ashoka Changemakers, joined her.
They stayed in an Airbnb owned by Jonathan and Lena Clyne, who had spent fifteen years rescuing Cuglieri's old houses from architectural neglect. Their plan was simple: rest. Think. Cook. Walk.
And in the slow rhythm of a Sardinian village — morning writing in the olive groves, afternoon swims, evenings cooking and talking for hours — something shifted. Tara finished significant work on her book. Dani solved a professional puzzle she'd been carrying for months. Together they sketched the bones of a National Geographic program now in motion.
They weren't being productive in the usual sense. They were simply being.
The pattern
And paradoxically, that's when the breakthrough work happened.
The pattern was clear. When people at the top of their fields get space to rest and time to connect across disciplines, something organic emerges. Not forced collaboration. Not manufactured innovation. The kind of magic that only arrives when there's room for it.
On a tour through town, Tara fell in love with a beautiful ruin on the main square. With the Clynes agreeing to manage the renovation through Nuraghi Development, and their son Leo — chef, food entrepreneur — proposing to run a ground-floor café, the vision crystallized. Tara bought the property. Dani began the process of buying the one next door.
Two historic houses, side by side, becoming the physical foundation for ZoMa House — born not as a business plan first, but as a calling to create a sanctuary where people like them could rest, connect, and transform.
Theory of change
Something inevitable happens.
If you take people who are already doing extraordinary work or carrying extraordinary potential, remove financial barriers entirely, place them in a protected and beautiful environment, feed them well, surround them with peers they would never otherwise meet, and give them a full month of breathing room — something inevitable happens.
Not always the same thing. But always something.
We believe the right conditions, applied consistently to the right people in the right place, will over time produce new works of art, new scientific approaches, new business models, new alliances, and new movements — the kind that emerge when brilliant minds meet across boundaries in a safe space designed to make that meeting possible.
Put the right people together, nourish them well, and give them time and space. ZoMa House is that space.
Beyond the month
The residency doesn't end when you leave.
The month is the seed. The network is what grows. Cohorts join a living global community designed for long-after-the-fact serendipity — the kind that turns a dinner in 2027 into a published collaboration in 2030.
The living network
Three ways the connection keeps going.
I
Small Circles
Groups of 8–12 alumni across cohorts, organised by shared question — Storytelling for Climate Action, Art & Science, Regenerative Futures. Monthly 90-min calls. Self-facilitated.
II
Annual Gathering
One week each August in Cuglieri. Every Explorer invited. Circles meet in person. Structured programming, plenty of free time. New collaborations catalysed under string lights.
III
Resident-in-Residence
Come back. Alumni return to Cuglieri for 1–2 weeks between cohorts at a deep subsidy. Work on a project, host a workshop, sit in on a current cohort's dinner.
A future you can see
"A marine biologist studying coral bleaching meets a documentary filmmaker over dinner."
Six months later, they co-create a multimedia exhibition. A social entrepreneur from their cohort connects them to a funder. The exhibition tours museums worldwide and wins prizes for innovation. This is the kind of magic we're building infrastructure for.
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