Home: Mountreuil

Architect Louis Paillard purchased a small 112 m² plot close to the centre of this district, with a view to building a family home and studio where his life partner could practise her circus skills on the trapeze. Built flush with the street line, the house is enclosed on one side by a small building consisting of five new apartments, which was also designed by Paillard for a private developer. Its facade is a continuous plane of black bricks punctuated by contrasting orange window frames. The other neighbour could not be more different: a traditional detached house with millstone-grit walls.

The house was designed to combine the two principal functions of living and working under the same roof, and in the finished building these two functions are strikingly expressed and easily identifiable. In both volume and architectural treatment, the building as a whole resembles a juxtaposition of two distinct building projects, an impression reinforced by the choice of construction systems and facade materials. The residential base consists of concrete walls externally covered with vertically arranged strips of Douglas fir, while the area set aside for the trapeze has a metallic frame covered with 'gold' polycarbonate panels, a colour that harmonizes with the warm coppery tones of the wood.

The house, which measures fifteen metres in height, has three levels. There is a children's play area in the basement, while the ground floor is given over to a living room and kitchen, which open onto an internal garden through a large sliding window. On one side, the first floor comprises the parents' bedroom, which leads into a vast bathroom with glass walls. On the other side there is an office/library and small children's bedroom, in which sliding acoustic curtains on rails act as a mobile partition. The top floor, measuring nine metres in height, will serve as a large gymnasium. Its unusual dimensions are based on the maximum travel path of the swinging trapeze. For this reason, the main beam was positioned diagonally. The entire roof structure is bent and angled so that the flying trapeze artist never touches the roof. The gym has its own separate access from the street in order to protect the family's privacy during trapeze lessons.

Completely open-plan, the living spaces are unified spatially or visually by the staggered triple-level layout and lateral staircases. The materials used are coarse: some walls are made of blocks, others, together with the floors and staircases, are of concrete, and only a few of the walls are lined with white plasterboard. This combination of materials gives the entire building a very 'low tech' appearance. Because they face east-west, the rooms are flooded with light, which highlights the texture and grain of each material.