Description
A contemporary wooden house.
Built in 2007 by young architect Bertrand Hillmeyer, this house is a fine example of contemporary architecture. Built from wood, it illustrates the renaissance of wood in home architecture, a material rediscovered for its environmental, aesthetic and constructional qualities.
Set in a 350 m2 garden, the house overlooks the town and offers magnificent views over Rouen. With a floor area of 135 m2, it is split over two levels. The upper level comprises a vast cantilevered living room opening onto a triangular south-facing terrace, and an open-plan kitchen. The lower level, reserved for private use, comprises a master suite with dressing room and bathroom, as well as two children’s bedrooms, a shower room and a study.
The house is located in the hills above Rouen, in the peaceful countryside of the Coteaux Rouennais. It is set in a quiet, residential area offering a very pleasant environment just 5 minutes from the centre of Rouen. This small town has schools nearby.
A wood overlay
The architecture of this house is very contemporary. Its facades are enlivened by a variation in the types of windows. The reception areas feature large windows to take advantage of the panoramic views and let the light into the house, while the bedrooms have square windows or strip windows.This new house offers a very sober décor – white walls, dark parquet flooring and a metal spiral staircase – that leaves plenty of scope for conversion.
Bertrand Hillmeyer
Bertrand Hillmeyer, who graduated in 2005, is a promising young architect. For this, his first house project, he gave priority to the relationship with the site. He adopted simple, orthogonal lines and natural materials, such as wood, to integrate the house into its environment: the hillsides of Rouen and its holiday-style houses.
This house is part of the revival of wooden architecture, which the architects of the Modern Movement had abandoned. This light, environmentally-friendly material, which allows the house to blend in better with its natural surroundings, has been the subject of renewed interest from many architects in recent years.
Claude Marty has built many wooden houses in the Arcachon basin, including the Guyonnet Duperat house (1993), built on stilts in the forest, and the Maison du Four (1999), with its red cedar cladding and undulating pergola.
Alongside Bertrand Hillmeyer, a younger generation of architects is regularly adopting this material for very contemporary buildings, such as the “i+r” house in Velles (Indres, France, 2004), a cabin house with wooden cladding by architect Emmanuel Alassoeur, or Jean-Luc Moulin’s house, built using recyclable materials in Saint-Sébastien (Isère, France, 2005), which won first prize at the Sustainable Housing Biennial in Grenoble.