Country Gite in the Vosges Region - Laurent Noel - France

The country gîte designed by Atelier Martel is a familiar yet mysterious volume that seems to perch lightly on the snowy slopes of the Vosges. While the house borrows its vocabulary and materials from the surrounding buildings, the detailed interpretation of its elements makes it stand out. The number and shape of the apertures, the four-sided roof, the ornamental features confined to one fold—a thin contact line between two walls and a roof with no runners and cornices—turn it into a contemporary object that reinterprets local building vernacular.

Going beyond a regionalist posture (a vocabulary of forms and materials traditionally used in a given region) this project is a rereading of the traditional vernacular architecture of the Vosges. The finished project is a hybrid of two local typologies: farms that are “bien tournées” (well oriented) and “mal tournées” (badly oriented). With the former, the ridge of the farm roof runs perpendicular to the mountain slope to have the largest façade exposed to the sun. Over the centuries, constraints linked to growth and productivity gradually led builders to the principle of the “badly oriented” farm, in which the ridge runs parallel to the valley, enabling extensions towards side gables. The project combines these two principles to obtain four gabled façades and a roof with four sides, placing the house in a balanced relationship to the mountainside. Detached from the rectangular floor plan, an angle skews this relationship to reinforce the singularity of the volume.

In a reference to the plywood panels employed on building sites and the wood mouldings of bourgeois interiors, using light Douglas fir wood as the sole material simplifies the reading of the interior volumes. Obtained by juxtaposition, addition or even “compression” of the functions, the plan distinguishes two houses, the gîte and the home, assembling them on the outside to form a whole. Simple yet complex, this country gîte above all preserves the non-definitive nature of a model, in a particularly light and airy relationship to the landscape.