Description
The first house designed by Jean Nouvel
Built in 1973, this house is the result of a collaboration between the 25-year-old architects Jean Nouvel, Roland Baltera and François Seigneur, who were then working in Claude Parent’s office. It takes up the principles dear to the father of the “oblique function”, by proposing a dynamic spatiality, made of slanted planes and diagonal lines.
Over 50 years, the house has had three owners and has undergone various modifications to adapt its unique spaces to their respective lifestyles. Now combining contemporary family comfort with a unique heritage value, it is one of the few examples of the “oblique function” being applied to housing in France.
Set in a 2,100 m² plot, the house offers a total living area of 170 m².
An entrance on the north side of the building leads to the various spaces.
A large living room offers a bright, open-plan space that currently accomodates two lounges, marked by the slant of the glass roofs and pillars that punctuate the volume, as well as a dining room topped by a mezzanine accessible via a miller’s ladder that still needs to be converted. This space opens onto the garden and pleasant terraces, one of which has a swimming pool, thanks to the sliding bay windows. A kitchen with scullery and storeroom and a study with independent access complete the day area.
The night space, on the west side, includes a master suite with its own shower room, a second bedroom and a bathroom.
The house also benefits from an independent triple garage.
Originally designed for a couple, the house has been converted to make it habitable for a family of 4. An extension has been created in continuity with the old garage. The austerity of the original rough-cast concrete has been softened by the light-coloured surfaces of the floor and walls, painted white to reflect the natural light, and by the touches of warm colour that pay homage to Andrée Bellaguet’s original polychromy.
The house is located at, 20 minutes from Villeneuve-sur-Lot and 40 minutes from Marmande. Agen station, 30 minutes’ drive away, links Paris in 3h30.
Living at an angle
From the outside, the house appears as a semi-buried structure with sloping roofs covered in the corrugated steel sheets rising out of the ground. The movements of the land have been reworked by shifting the masses, to help blend the architecture into its environment and protect the living spaces and garden from outside view.
The sober, minimalist décor of the interior spaces is structured by the play of inclined planes, beams and concrete walls with varying degrees of slope; their surface is marked by the imprint of the formwork boards, which have been meticulously laid out. Their geometric pattern underlines the graphic quality of the elements and influences the perception of the space. While the slanted floor does not require the furniture to be adapted, it does create a new, sensitive experience of the living space when you move around.
This slope, combined with variations in the height of the roof, creates a play of levels between the rooms in the house and encourages a dynamic that can be open or intimate, depending on the day and night areas. The large living area, with its floor descending towards the garden and the ceiling rising towards the sky, opens up the volume to the garden. This dynamic effect is underlined by the generous south-facing glazing, which floods the living room with natural light.
A unique architectural testimony
In 1970, Jean Nouvel, who had been Claude Parent’s assistant for 3 years, set up his first architectural practice in parallel with François Seigneur. This house, built for Irène and Paul Delbigot in a suburban neighbourhood, was one of the architect’s first projects, and his only one in his native Lot-et-Garonne. Produced in collaboration with Roland Baltera, François Seigneur for the interior design and Andrée Bellaguet for the polychromy, this work was inspired by the theoretical and experimental work on the “oblique function” carried out by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. In the 1960s, Parent advocated“the end of the vertical as an axis of elevation, the end of the horizontal as a permanent plane, in favour of the oblique axis and the inclined plane”.
Claude Parent and Jean Nouvel in 1990, all rights reserved
Jean Nouvel, “starchitect” and Pritzker Prize winner
A major player on the French and international architectural scene for some forty years, Jean Nouvel is the author of a multifaceted body of work that has won numerous international awards, including the Grand Prix National d’Architecture and the Aga Khan in 1987, two Equerres d’Argent, a Lion d’Or and the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2008.
He trained with Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the early 1970s. In the early 1980s, he distinguished himself by his desire to move away from the debate between the modern and the post-modern, and proposed a contemporary approach that placed architecture within the culture of the image.
Jean Nouvel claims to have no style of his own, and develops each project as a new concept. The building designed for the Institut du Monde Arabe (1987, Paris), for which he won the competition in 1981 with Gilbert Lévénès, Pierre Soria and Architecture Studio, evokes oriental culture in a non-literal way. He used a similar principle for the Doha High Rise Office Tower (2012, Qatar) and the immense domes of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017, United Arab Emirates).
Today, the architect presides over several agencies grouped under the name Ateliers Jean Nouvel (AJN). His multidisciplinary and multicultural teams now number more than 130 worldwide.
Technical info
Asking price: €690,000
Fees included and payable by the vendor.
Full ownership
Property tax :
Heating: Gas, air conditioning
Collective sewerage
Roller shutters
DPE : E – GES : D
Estimation des coûts annuels : entre 2 290 € et 3 160 € par an, prix moyens des énergies indexés au 1er janvier 2021