Rue de l’Église
The Project at a Glance
Completed in December 2025 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Rue de l’Église project redevelops a 1970s office building to meet 21st-century standards of well-being, workplace quality, and urban integration. Without prior demolition, the operation demonstrates that it is possible to densify, improve, and transform an ordinary commercial building stock through a simultaneous intervention on three dimensions: the façade, the ground, and the roof.
Led by Crédit Agricole Immobilier and designed by VLAU and COVE Architectes in partnership, the project encompasses 3,150 m² of treated floor area, including 850 m² of newly created space and 494 m² demolished, for a construction cost of €10,113,000 excluding VAT. It has been awarded the BBC Rénovation label.
Context and Challenges
The original building, constructed in the 1970s, sits set back from the street within the residential fabric of Neuilly-sur-Seine. With a façade considered architecturally poor, it had already undergone an initial renovation in 1996, carried out by architect Marie-Odile Foucras, to improve its thermal and acoustic performance. Yet its commercial-office character and its setback from the street, which left a low-quality urban void, remained unchanged.
The current commission arose from a twofold ambition: to fill this neglected space, reconcile the building with its residential surroundings, and bring it up to contemporary standards of performance and comfort.
The project is part of a broader inquiry into the obsolescence of 20th-century commercial building stock. Faced with the climate emergency and the need to limit demolition-and-rebuild cycles, it offers an alternative: architectural resilience through densification and transformation.
Architectural Concept: Three Strategies for the 21st Century
Densify: The Inhabited Street Setback
The first intervention consists of eliminating the urban void by constructing a horizontal extension across the full height of the existing building, up to the sixth floor. This addition creates a new continuous street frontage, fully conceals the gable wall of the neighbouring building, and generates 850 m² of additional floor space. Densification is achieved without any new land footprint, reclaiming a residual space.
Excavate: From Underground Parking to a Planted Patio
Below ground, the parking levels are transformed into workspaces organized around an excavated patio. This excavation brings natural light and greenery into the heart of the building, converting blind, underused areas into quality spaces for living and working. The shift from car to garden illustrates a change of use emblematic of the post-pandemic office revival.
Open Up: The Roof as a Suspended Space
The roof is converted into a planted rooftop, offering occupants a suspended terrace with views over La Défense and Paris. This third layer of the intervention completes the building’s three-dimensional transformation — façade, ground, and roof — and reinforces the bioclimatic ambition of the project, certified BBC Rénovation.
The Façade: Between Stone and Domesticity
The street-facing façade is the centerpiece of the project. To integrate it into Neuilly’s residential fabric while allowing optimal use of the office floor plates, the architects developed a hybrid language, halfway between a residential building and a commercial one.
The 135 cm grid typical of office façades was combined into 270 cm bays. This doubling of the module produces wider openings, evocative of the Parisian residential window, while ensuring optimal lighting for the workstations. This domestic character of the façade also opens up a future possibility: the building could eventually be converted into housing without any major architectural disruption.
In terms of materiality, Saint-Maximin stone — the same stone that clads the inner districts of Paris — was chosen for its timeless character and its rootedness in the architectural vocabulary of Greater Paris. It is used as solid stone at the base of the façade, anchoring the building in the mineral narrative of the capital.
The courtyard façade takes a different approach: while it retains the original design as a trace of the building as it once was, it is no less carefully worked. The existing staircase has been extended and highlighted, while a metal mesh ties and unifies the whole, creating coherence between old and new.
The Staircase: A Green Link
Originally required by fire regulations as an external emergency exit, the staircase has been redefined as an architectural promenade. Tracing an open spiral onto the garden, it becomes a sculptural element in its own right, revealing an unexpected vegetal and structural presence from within the block.
Cables stretched along its structure allow climbing plants to colonize the vertical space, creating a biological continuity between the ground-floor garden — enhanced by the excavation of the parking levels — and the planted roof. The staircase is thus defined as a green link between the two levels of nature integrated into the building.
