Project Name: 18.24VAL Guest House Les Grands Chênes
Architecture Firm: SAPIENS ARCHITECTES
Contact e-mail: contact@sapiens.archi
Firm Location: Paris, France and Montpellier, France.
Completion Year: 2020
Gross Built Area: 180 m2
Project location: Valojoulx (24), France
Lead Architects: Baptiste Manet et Yann Legouis
Lead Architects e-mail: contact@sapiens.archi
Photo credits: Agnès Clotis
Photographer’s e-mail: clotisagne@gmail.com
In the village of Valojoulx, in the southwest of France, Sapiens architectes has just completed a stone, wood, and glass “cabanon” nestled in the oak forest. The order was simple: a reception house, sometimes for guests (high season), sometimes for artists in residence (low season). Inserted in the slope, the building plants its powerful gables in local stone to the east and west and unfolds large glass surfaces towards the forest, sectioned with wooden mullions.
The common room is located on the upper garden level; it rises above the slope and offers a panoramic view of the trees. On the lower garden level, the individual night spaces replicate this generous opening onto the vegetation. The connection with the environment is never lost, making the rustling of leaves, the variations of light, the calm flow of time, sensitive.
It is thanks to this ability of the architecture to resonate with the place and the memory, to link times, that the architects shape a heritage continuity. Yet they do not hesitate to use contemporary materials: steel for the woodwork, grey corrugated iron for the gable roof, whose color will mimic that of the lauze stone of the neighboring buildings over time.
Fruit of reality, the architecture of Sapiens wants to have the force of the necessity: it could not be transposed elsewhere.
