Description
Seventies spirit in Haute Garonne
This house, designed by architect André Roux in 1973, combines a modernist approach imbued with local sensibility with a typical 1970s décor that has been perfectly preserved by its current owners.
Set in 8,060 sqm of land with uninterrupted views of the Pyrenees mountain range, it offers 225 sqm of living space over two levels.
The ground floor features a double-height entrance hall leading to a beautiful living area with lounge, dining room and separate kitchen. The lounge area, with its open fireplace and built-in corner seating, offers a warm and intimate space, amplified by the variation in ceiling height. The dining area is wide open to the garden and landscape thanks to its custom-made bay windows and skylights, which follow the slope of the ceiling and maximise the amount of natural light.
A corridor leads to the sleeping wing, comprising two offices, three bedrooms and a bathroom. From the entrance hall, a beautiful wooden staircase leads to the first floor, partly under the rafters, which includes two bedrooms, one with a working fireplace, a dressing room, a shower room, a lounge area and plenty of storage space. A third bathroom could also be added.
A laundry room, workshop and garage complete the property.
The land, which is suitable for swimming pools, can be partly built on.
The house enjoys a peaceful, unspoilt setting just a few minutes’ walk from the centre of Auriac, which has all local amenities (shops, services, schools), 30 km from Toulouse and 40 km from Castres.
Between tradition and modernity
The house has recently been renovated. It retains all of its period features, designed by the André Roux agency’s interior design department, reflecting a global approach to the project. The pop aesthetic of the spaces features a contrasting palette of materials: cloud-grain rendering painted white sits alongside dark exotic wood for the door and window frames, light-coloured wood for the panelling, exposed beams and built-in furniture, waxed concrete for the floors, coloured solid colours for the yellow and blue doors, and graphic tiling for the bathrooms.
Somewhere between modernism and tradition, the house draws its aesthetic strength from an eclectic approach linked to the critical regionalism movement of the 1970s, which gave a new lease of life to local features. Its horizontal body with small round-headed windows at the top, sloping roofs and use of brick, tiles and wood evoke the agricultural and religious architecture of the region. The generosity of the glazed openings, the rendered concrete and the refined geometric design of the composition assert a resolutely modern approach.
André Roux
The architect André Roux (1924-2019) entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1944, where he studied in the Roger-Henri Expert studio and the Madelain studio. He graduated in 1957 and set up his own practice in Paris’s 8th district.
Technical info
Asking price: €495 000
Fees payable by the vendor
Land tax: €2,132
Full ownership.
Heating system: air/water heat pump
New individual drainage system
ENERGY CLASS: C / CLIMATE CLASS: A
Estimated average annual energy costs for standard use, based on 2021 energy prices: between €1,860 and €2,550.