It is for their old days that the owners of this house located in the suburbs of Caen decided to build an extension to match their new way of life. Their current house has ​​119sqm on 3 floors (a basement used as a garage, the ground floor as living spaces and the first floor is dedicated to bedrooms) on a land of 873sqm. The extension should be easy to access and allow a disabled person to move easily inside the space in case one day that one of the two owners uses a wheelchair.

 

The project was therefore to create an extension on the north-western part of the existing home. The new volume was positioned in this part of the property in order to keep up the integrity of the garden that develops around the house. Moreover, this portion of the garden suffers less from the shadow of the existing house during the day.

 

The extension includes a bedroom, a dressing room, a bathroom and an extra office space. It is located between the existing house and the western property boundary. It is recessed compared to the existing house along the retaining wall of the garden and turns around to be attached to the house.

This position gives it some mystery. It faces the garage access and gives the feeling of an observatory perched on its base.

 

View from the street, the extension reveals a part of the geometry of its volume without totally revealing it. The random position of the windows breaks the monotony of this black massive shape and makes it look less heavy.

 

From the garden the new volume has a small private mineral outdoor patio on which the bedroom and bathroom can be totally opened. The patio plays with transparency of the louvers and the density of the materials. The extension can be read as the composition of two small huts around this new private outdoor space.

 

From the street, the roof looks like one simple element but it reveals the complex geometry of its shape from the garden, like the folding of a Japanese origami. The extension is an intimate volume open on its garden.