photos © Myriam Tirler & Mieko Levy
master plan
ground floor
fisrt floor
transversal section / south elevation
east elevation
The MG house is located at Les Lilas, an adjacent town of the North East Paris.
This project involves renovating and extending a small buildings complex of the thirties in a very dilapidated condition.
The buildings are developed along a cobbled, narrow and stretched out courtyard toward a green garden at the end of the lot.
Due to successive extensions, the buildings formed a heterogeneous and disordered composition.
Built of bricks and covered with pink-ochre colour coating, it seems frozen in time.
The program responds to the desire of an architect's couple and their young child to create a family home.
The architectural choice was to keep only the main central body of the existing building rising on two levels.
It is extended to the north and south at the same height. Their ends are biased and largely glazed in order to open the angle of view over the landscape: southwards to the garden and northwards to the city.
The narrow vertical lot's section (3 m width and 17 m length) and promiscuity with neighbouring buildings were determining constraints in the choice of the facades drawing and of the final house morphology.
The result is a light grey monolith on two levels, pure and slender.
The largely glazed facades, built in slanted position at each end of the house aim to sharpen the building and to emphasise its linearity in response to the plot's form.
This linearity is enhanced by small and occasional openings at the bottom floor that is read as a massive base.
The quite massive appearance of the house was also wanted by the architect to preserve the privacy of its inhabitants in a dense and close built environment.
The supporting structure of the existing building consists in load bearing walls of brick and wooden beams. It will be kept as much as possible. The southern and northern extensions are built in concrete block walls and concrete floors.
The three pitched roof is extended to include the extensions by the conversion of the existing wooden roof frame. A zinc standing seam roof system replaces then the existing roof tiles.
The inside organization is structured on either side of the central core which is flooded with natural light through a glass roof whose shape responds to the triangular floor opening.
All the living spaces are south facing: the kitchen and the dining-room on the basement floor in front of the garden and the living-room is located upstairs. The bedrooms are at the other side of the building.
Inside the house, everything has been thought in order to capture as much natural light as possible and to make continuous and fluid circulation and view.
Walls are white as far as the eyes can see. Floor extends through a light grey linoleum. Only the kitchen floor is covered by white rectangular tiles with black joints that allow it to define its own space.
The central staircase becomes a kind of "masterpiece" which stands out by its decorative treatment from the other spaces. The stairs are adorned by a very veined marble from Portugal of pink and amber colours. The walls surrounding the staircase are painted in a plain " Naples pink " in response to the multitude of colours and patterns of the marble.
The work of mirrors enables to play on spatial illusions, and the surrounding garden enters into the house.
A large wall mirror is placed directly below the glass roof and above the staircase.
It accentuates the linearity of the building and expand visually all the living-room 's space.
There is the same illusion in the kitchen on the ground floor through a quite massive cabinet in mirror which allows separating the kitchen and the dining-room from the entrance.
Both bedrooms stand together by white walls punctuated with a triangular coloured shape painted on one of the top corners of each room.
