Between dunes and forests… In search of the Ecole Bordelaise

by Achille Penciolelli

Perched on the heights of Arcachon, nestled among the pines, stands a silent house : Villa Geneste. Listed as a historic monument, it remains the manifesto of an architecture born in Bordeaux in the 1960s, a time when concrete, light, and landscape still spoke a common language. Designed by Yves Salier, Adrien Courtois, and Pierre Lajus, this villa encapsulates the sensitivity of a forgotten movement : the École Bordelaise.

Sold by Architecture de Collection in 2024, Villa Geneste is far more than a modernist masterpiece, it is a fragment of history. Here, geometric rigor meets the gentleness of the site; concrete becomes a sensitive material; volumes harmonize with the terrain; and light sculpts every surface. Nothing is ostentatious, everything is just right. Villa Geneste embodies a human-scale modernism, rooted in its territory and open to the Atlantic sky.
Around this foundational project orbits a generation of architects, Salier, Courtois, Lajus, Sadirac, discreet yet essential figures of a vernacular, precise, and meditative modernism. Together, they built a cohesive body of work where each house becomes a laboratory of form and balance. Their approach, at the intersection of the rational and the poetic, always seeks the right relationship between humanity and landscape.

It was in this spirit that they designed the Maison Girolle in 1969. Conceived as a prototype for a prefabricated, transportable, and economical wooden house, it is both a democratic manifesto and an experiment in architectural freedom. Nearly seven hundred were built, from the Arcachon Basin to the Gironde countryside. With its lightweight structure, rational volumes, and open plan, the Girolle embodies an optimistic vision of communal living: inhabiting in symbiosis with climate and light rather than enclosed behind walls.

But beyond typologies, the Ecole Bordelaise represents above all an attitude, a way of listening to the land before drawing on it, of welcoming wind, slope, and light before geometry. This humble yet learned sensitivity finds one of its most accomplished expressions today in Villa Renaudin in Villefranque.

Nestled on a hillside facing the Pyrenees, this house by Salier and Courtois (1975) revisits and extends the movement’s founding principles. The architecture embraces the topography, blends into the vegetation, and frames the landscape without ever dominating it. Each level engages with the horizon : in the morning, light filters through the kitchen from a shaded patio; in the evening, it floods the cathedral-like living room, where the fireplace becomes a sculpture. Cantilevered roofs, split levels, and successive terraces demonstrate a masterful command of the relationship between the built and the natural.

Villa Renaudin belongs to those rare places where architecture becomes a way of life. Open to the landscape, breathing with it, it has preserved its soul and balance. Thoughtfully restored to its original design, it embodies what the Bordeaux School achieved at its finest : a timeless, inhabited work of contemporary architecture.

Around it, an entire network of discreet houses tells another story of Southwest French architecture. In Gironde, Landes, Béarn, and the Basque Country, other architects, Brigitte Gonfreville, Edmond Lay, Jean-Raphaël Hébrard, Claude Marty, Pierre Cauly, Louis Gombeaud, and Jacques and Pierre Debaig, continue this quest for balance between modernity and nature, structure and emotion, geometry and light.

These houses, born in the 1960s and 1970s, form a coherent yet nearly invisible body of work today. They share a common vision: a serene modernism at the crossroads of California’s Case Study Houses and Atlantic vernacular traditions. Neither brutalist nor regionalist, they emerge from a situated art of building, shaped by climate and soil. An architecture of silence, where design fades behind light.

The Ecole Bordelaise is often reduced to a mere group of Bordeaux-based architects. Yet it is so much more, a quiet movement born of a shared sensitivity. Its origins lie in the post-war era, when France sought to reconcile modernity with local culture. In Bordeaux, this quest took a singular form: a critical regionalism, a modernism anchored in the geography of the Southwest, attuned to Atlantic light, forest, and wind.

This generation understood that one must build with the climate, not against it. They embraced slope, shade, natural ventilation, and continuity between interior and exterior. From the Girolle to concrete villas, these architects invented a way of living: rational yet poetic, open yet sheltered, where technical precision aligns with the sensitivity of place.

All shared the same intuition: a post-modern modernism before its time, blending vernacular heritage, climate consciousness, and plastic freedom. Their architecture, neither local nor universal, is simply right, situated, and deeply human.

Why did this movement never gain recognition beyond its region? Perhaps because it was too discreet, too rooted, without a manifesto or official school. Overshadowed by the spectacle of brutalism and contemporary architecture, its works endure, hidden among the pines, integrated into the slopes, indifferent to trends. They do not seek to seduce but to endure.

And that is precisely their strength. These silent houses still speak to what architecture should be: an art of place, a way of inhabiting the world without constraining it. At a time when the Southwest landscape is being standardized by generic homes, rediscovering, restoring, and preserving these architectures is an act of cultural resistance.

The Ecole Bordelaise is not just a memory of the 1960s but a living thread connecting architects, ideas, and gestures. It reminds us that between modernist rigor and vernacular sensuality lies an essential space for creation, a space where architecture ceases to be a product and becomes a language: of wind, concrete, wood, light, and time.

How many of these houses still slumber in the pines, invisible and forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered? Villa Geneste, Villa Renaudin, and countless others bear witness to this fragile and precious heritage. It is up to us to understand it before it vanishes, for within these unassuming structures may lie the key to a more just, rooted, and human future.

Achille Penciolelli

Architecte HMNOP, Atlantic Coast negociator