R House
“R House" is a project to transform a bourgeois house built in the 1930s. It is located in the historic town of Fourqueux, closed to Saint Germain en Laye (78). Located on the edge of the street, the house has a large garden, accessible from two lateral courtyards. It consists of a square plan on 3 levels, and flanked by a turret.
The existing house is introverted, partitioned, and has an unused roof space. Its new owners want to trans-form it to create a large, open family home to accommodate the couple and their three daughters.
The answer suggested was to re-emphasize the initial structure of the house on the ground floor, by decom-partmentalising the whole to create a coherent composition between the kitchen, the dining room and the living room. Under the roof, the renovation has created 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms by exploiting the volu-metry offered under the four-sided roof.
The project is built around the emblematic elements of the house: the fireplace, the staircase, the turret, etc. It multiplies the points of tension around these archetypes according to different staging and latency process-es. Visual framing links the different spaces by suggesting a multiplicity of paths, often virtual, in contradiction with the physical circuits. The body then moves back and forth from space to space.
The functions concealed in the thicknesses of the walls (chimney, dressing, tidying up, bathroom, visual links) are all enigmas that encourage the playful exploration and the intimate discovery of the house.
