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Architects: AJILE architects
- Area: 204 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Cecile Septet, AJILE architectes, Vanessa Bosio
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Manufacturers: AutoDesk, Chaos Group, Adobe, ENO Studio, Fermob, Marketset lightning, NV Gallery, Zangra, sammode
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Engineering: AVAL consultants, 5 rue Fourneaux 91 840 Soisy-sur-Ecole
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General Contractor: BATI98, 7 rue Nobel 75 018 Paris
Text description provided by the architects. Perched high up the Butte Bergeyre in the 19th arrondissement, this vertical house dominates Paris. Being able to build a new private home in Paris is a rare opportunity, all the more unique on this very butte, fully integrated within the Parisian cityscape. The challenge was to settle in a family with four children over seven levels, on a minimal adjoining plot only 4.80 m large. Erected on ten 18-meter-deep micropiles, this 204 square-meter house is a manifesto for vertical living in dense spaces.
The whole project was strategically thought of as a volume, rather than a series of floors, in constant relation with its surroundings, close or distant. The house spreads over seven open levels, stitched together by polymorphous vertical circulations. Each stage, with its specific shape, area, and use, is articulated with the next in an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
Framed between two adjoining houses, this dual aspect house receives light only from two north and south opposing façade. On the first three levels near the entrance, the common areas are all linked and seen as a coherent configuration. The entrance level on the ground floor gives access to the living room at garden level and to the kitchen on the second floor in a common volume, where light, air circulation between the opposing front walls, and lose thresholds, all contribute to a great spatial fluidity.
The children’s bedrooms spread out over the next two levels, the third and fourth floors, interlaced together with large open landings, in direct continuation of the common areas, and each set up as a playroom, reading corner, or private living room. On the fifth floor, withdrawn from the façades and set between two opposite decks, the master bedroom is a small aerie lodge. This last level needs to be crossed to reach the rooftop terrace via an outdoor staircase, with an all-around view. Generously planted, the house’s crowning room towers over Paris. Comfort in this house relies on the highly valued variations of light in the surroundings, but also from the very building system and its excellent inertia.
Built in isolated wood bricks, the house requires little heating in winter and has a substantial cooling capacity, ideal for summer. This combines with natural ventilation, directly from one façade to the other, as all north and south oriented bay windows boast different opening systems and rhythms. Such variety enables for a great diversity of drafts between each level. The building system also absorbs sound and no resonance or echo comes to bother this lively house.
During the COVID-period, the Maison Bergeyre makes all the more sense, conceived with foresight for a successful quarantine in a city like Paris, a testament to the necessity to integrate new housing paradigms. The house offers a calm temporality, where moving or still bodies can live in a changing space unconstrained from its four walls. This home is all about infinity.
