The artist painted a night sky with thousands of stars, the walls of open porous sandstone had speakers built into them with two big Arabic stone arches at the entrance.

Construction of the 3,000 square meter Moroccan-style mansion began in April 1997, after the local PP Town Mayor, disregarding environmentalist advise that it was illegal, signed the permit to build. The construction took nine years to build at a cost of €20 million. It took only three weeks to demolish. 

The Balearic Courts in Palma heard that Cretu started building the studio and Villa in 1997 without obtaining the correct planning permission, which was only later issued by San Antonio’s town hall. He then refurbished and enlarged again without official sign off,  which again enraged his neighbours and the islands very effective green activist group GEN, who campaigned publically in the media for the villa to be demolished.

In 2003, after years of  complex legal action, the Spanish Supreme court ruled that the Villa was illegally built in an area of maximum environmental protection with an illegal building licence, and issued the order for demolition. This did not go down well with the local PP party who had lobbied hard to retain the property and studio as a special case, using their infulence to pass legislation in Palma via the Ibiza Island Council offices, to halt the demolition.  The PP claimed the property was not built on a hill, (to bypass the Spanish Law that prevents building on hills) when clearly it was from all evidence available. A Mexican standoff ensued, between the PP council supporting Cretu in San Antonio and the Supreme Court in Palma. The PP employed every legal trick and loophole in the book to preserve the artists home, but the courts kept issuing fines to the municipality.

A political scandal mired in corruption, black money and some powerful local names, came out in the wash during the legal investigation which arose the attention of the international press. After 14 years of controversy, at 09.15am on a sunny May 7 morning bulldozers hired by San Antonio town council at a cost of €350K  moved in and started the demolition. Cretu sold all his property and assets on the island and left never to return.  However the political fault lines of that affair still echo today. At the time the PSOE demanded that those responsible for the affair, including the PP mayor and technicians who originally awarded the permits back in 1997, should personally pay the fines and the €18 million compensation Cretu sued the council for, a sum that could bankrupt municipality.  Soon after the same names and factions were embroiled in another environmental battle as two major infrastructure projects, highways from Ibiza to San Antonio and Airport displaced hundreds of families on the island.