Maison de Verre: a dramatic glass home in France by Studio Odile Decq

With this new home – Maison de Verre – in Carantec, Brittany, Studio Odile Decq has taken a fancy transient for a consumer with a degenerative eye situation that was step by step robbing him of his sight. At his request, the sunshine needed to be good, homogeneous and with out glare,’ the architects clarify.

There have been loads of Maisons de Verre all through the historical past of recent structure, with Pierre Chareau’s famed 1928 dwelling for Dr Jean Dalsace changing into the archetype for a proto-industrial home modernism.

This contemporary iteration is a construction that’s made totally of glass, ‘a field of pure mild’. Mixing milky white glazing with reflective gloss black panels, the home seems tilted and alien to its grassy suburban website, as if a shard of high-tech industrial structure had by some means discovered its method right into a small-town plot. 

The architects have ensured the location is hid and personal, with new hedges and fruit timber added to the plot to extend the home’s sense of dramatic isolation.

The bizarre façade was designed to create a lightweight however not uncomfortably obvious inside area, one which the architects describe as a ‘cocoon… remoted from the remainder of the world’. Residing areas have white partitions, the black glass shields the practical areas like loos and kitchens.

Studio Odile Decq labored with a specialist glazing provider, Okalux, to make partitions from insulated panels of translucent glazing, mounted right into a hidden structural metal grid.

The panels sandwich a skinny sheet of insulating textile between the panes, guaranteeing the sunshine that filters by way of is diffuse and even, with out casting robust shadows.

A couple of standard home windows are set into the partitions to present backyard views from the principle double-height residing area, which incorporates an open-plan kitchen, a sitting and eating space, together with a glass tread staircase that leads as much as the principle bed room (two extra bedrooms are positioned on the bottom flooring).

The ceiling on the Maison de Verre can also be a significant supply of daylight, constituted of lighter glazed panels aligned with the angled grid, off that are hung some fastidiously chosen synthetic lights. 

From the backyard, the home seems like a glowing lantern at evening, defiantly totally different but additionally way more non-public than its earlier namesakes.

Odile Decq arrange her studio in 1979 and was quickly joined by her husband Benoît Cornette. The duo grew to become generally known as daring exponents of a deconstructed high-tech method, an idiosyncratic and extremely romantic method to what had develop into a brand new worldwide type.