Make a Shape

Words by Nicole Stock
Photography e.saillet@GAP Interiors

Barrès Coquet architects use a dynamic shape to reinterpret the French country house.

The country house is defined in contrast to what it is not – the city house. In France, the country house is celebrated for its link with traditional French living but there is often a struggle with how this sense of tradition translates into contemporary architecture. Simultaneously, though paradoxically, the country offers freedom, an escape from the sometimes suffocating conventions and etiquettes of the city. Architecture in country or holiday homes often must try to resolve opposing ideals – the releasing of bonds and a tightening of bonds.

This modern country house designed by French architects Caroline Barrès and Thierry Coquet of Barrès Coquet Architects, succeeds due to tight-roping between those two extremes. While its form and materials gives it an avant-garde dynamic, its planning doesn’t step outside of the norm, creating a house that feels familiar despite its many unusual elements.

Château influences or anything that immediately springs to mind as you utter ‘French Country Home’ have been abandoned in this modern house. Instead of overt architectural references, this house connects with a lineage of rural French building through more subtle relationship dynamics. Considerations for family, landscape and
a certain joie de vivre are apparent throughout the house in the spatial arrangements, connections between interior and exterior and a fastidiousness of style.

Rather than a hipped or Mansard roof of more traditional French architecture, this house cuts a dramatic shape into the landscape with its triangle form. The 45° sloped side works both as wall and roof. The vertical elevation, and, more typically, the sloped elevation as well, are kept resolutely flat. Apart from a deck that cantilevers from the mezzanine living area, the face is abruptly level. The detailing of the windows continues this seamless plane so that their reflective surface almost seems to merge with the reflective aluminium, again underscoring a sense of shape and form above all other conventions. Its flatness is, perhaps even more so than the triangle shape, the house’s most pointed move away from tradition. The slick wall
is fortress-like, with such an abandonment of ornament that it feels unnatural. While many houses try to soften themselves to make them more homely and accommodating, this house relishes its machine-like aloofness.

This sense of measured detachment is continued through to its placement on the site. Positioned delicately on a gently sloping hill, the house barely seems to touch the ground. The front (vertical) elevation is suspended off the ground while the rear apex of the triangle lightly pin-points the ground, but again doesn’t reinforce any sense of structure or weight bearing. The effect is to further enhance the shapeliness of the triangle shape – in its apparent lightness the form disconnects from ‘house’ and reads more like a toy block or discarded factory piece. That ambiguity of scale is part of what gives depth and interest to this project. The slightly elevated connection between the lower floor and the grounds also subtly reinforce that château-image of the building providing a pedestal with promenading stairs down into the gardens, both a moment of survey and detachment.

Though the exterior gesture is grand, the interior is relatively contained. The tight plan puts all the living and communal areas on the top floors while bedrooms tuck into the ground level. The bedrooms then enjoy a sense of containment while the living areas make the most of the panoramic views and take advantage of the energetic spatial arrangement created as the slope of the roof demarcates the edge of the rooms. The benefit of the triangle form is not any extra space in plan – if anything, this form is constraining – but rather the height created with the triangle creates a sense of sumptuousness that belies the somewhat austere cladding materials and finishes. The high stud, especially in the living areas, is also an important, albeit subtle, connection back to the traditional French Country House with its generous ceilings, and can even recall the attic-like upper level spaces that open out from inside the slope of zinc roofs.

The triangle form is somewhat deceiving. The house proper is a rather traditional layout on two rectangular levels, and the awkward leftover space as the angled wall/roof pulls down towards the ground is instead not part of the house, but forms a sort of car (or rather scooter) port. This seamless integration of function with a strong articulation of space again shows the architect’s focus and thoroughness.

Industrial aluminium cladding has been used both outside and in. The careful arrangement of the metal never veers into garage-mode, however, but rather the polished sheen creates a sense of glamour and again, luxury, confusing the assumed notions around materials. The vertical elevation feels, from the inside, that the entire surface is window, such is the brightness, but in actual fact, there are only narrow strip windows while the majority of the surface is clad in vertically patterned acrylic which lets light in but offers privacy from its muted distortion. From the exterior, the acrylic melds seamlessly with the shiny aluminium, continuing the clear articulation of the vertical face.

The potential difficulty with a house that takes such a strong form is that its shell remains detached from the life lived inside. The interior furnishings in this house are key in transforming this country house from a cold, industrial lean-to, to a vibrant family home. Vibrant is obviously a term the clients took to heart. The house is filled with a carefully edited selection of contemporary design furniture. Many of the key pieces are in bright colours, but they keep to modern, linear forms that reflect the architecture.

Architects Barrès and Coquet have managed to acknowledge the often conflicting desires and roles of the rural escape and have successfully translated this into a built form. These unusual combinations ­– a juxtaposition of luxurious and functional materials, the unflinching hard-edged triangle shape hosting a cozy family unit or untraditional forms that reference the traditional – show their appreciation of balance. Familiarity and surprise happen in equal doses, exactly what you’re after on holiday. u