Living in Paris for many years but eager to create a family environment outside the capital, our clients have chosen to buy a holiday home near Paris. This new residence will accommodate all the family and friends during weekends and holidays. It is essentially a home for leisure and conviviality.

 

Our clients looked for various property, first close to the surroundings of Angoulême and then in Normandy. Finally, after many months of research, they found a property near Alençon in Normandy. It is a large property in the middle of the countryside with a beautiful landscape, a pond and a heated swimming pool.

This beautiful two-hectare property has seen several uses before it was bought by the current owners (main house, summer camp, etc.). As highlighted in the commercial real estate brochure « Three centuries were necessary for the completion, at the end of the 19th century, of this house of beautiful proportions, which give it a very classic interior distribution, enhanced by beautiful light volumes. »

 

Four buildings are spread over the property, a stone outbuilding formerly a caretaker's house, a stone shed serving as a garage, a more recent masonry building serving as a workshop and the main house which is the result of multiple successive additions.

Each building extension is recognizable by the lowering of its roof compared to the previous volumes. A contemporary veranda located perpendicular to the rest of the volumes completes the building. Therefore, the house looks like a large stone farmhouse with many stepped levels.

 

In this main building, the previous owners had undertaken many renovation works including the dining room, the kitchen, some bedrooms and the magnificent monumental wooden staircase. However, they were not able to complete all of the works, leaving much of the house in poor condition.

Many rooms were therefore left raw without lining and insulation, revealing the stone of the exterior walls. Some floors could not be completed and give a glimpse of the lower levels through the many breaches in the structural wooden floors. Finally, the plumbing and electricity networks of the rooms concerned were installed but never completed.

The rooms to be finalized had beautiful stone volumes (often associated with large fireplaces), for which it was necessary to define uses and exploit the potentials, and in particular the current attic which has never been visited and which had a beautiful height.

 

The client program was simple: create a large reception room, a beautiful dining kitchen, a dormitory for children and their "friends" and as many rooms as possible with bathrooms to accommodate family and friends.

 

It is therefore within this existing framework and the works already present that our intervention should be carried out. The renovation required to take into consideration the heritage characteristics of the house and to highlight the unused elements of the building while preserving the classic style of the house.