An Eccentric Facade Turns Heads at This House Outside Paris

At a dancer’s home in the suburbs, a series of louvers balance privacy and openness while shading the interiors.

Jan 19, 2022 - 00:17

An Eccentric Facade Turns Heads at This House Outside Paris

At a dancer’s home in the suburbs, a series of louvers wrapping the exterior balance privacy and openness.

"It was one of my dreams," says Blandine Minot as she slowly folds her legs into a pretzel. "The drawings that I did when I was seven or eight years old were full of tree houses." A modern dancer, Blandine has taken a seat on a tatami mat in the mezzanine that presides over her new home. From this perch, with a close-up view of a plum tree outside the house’s large windows, she seems to have gotten her wish.

Outside Paris, Blandine Minot and Olivier Stora’s home appears to float above a preexisting wall. The second story is wrapped with louvers, which shade the interior and provide privacy. "We were interested in the idea of a structure secretly staring at the street," says architect Sihem Lamine of Arba.
Photo by Jérémie Léon

In fact, a forest metaphor is a great way to describe the home. On a bustling street in the Parisian suburb Fontenay-sous-Bois, the 1,428-square-foot structure sits on an infill lot behind a masonry wall that once enclosed a farmhouse. It obscures the home’s ground floor, where private spaces—three bedrooms and a bath—are concealed like the understory in the woods. Upstairs, the voluminous second floor contains the home’s more public spaces under a broad gable roof that soars like a tree canopy, with the mezzanine tucked like a bird’s nest under a corner of the roofline.

Blandine stands at the home’s entryway, where the siding is treated with black pine resin. The louvers were placed late in the build. "It was nice before the shutters were installed, but we were completely naked toward the city," she says. "We wound up losing a little bit of light, but I prefer to be dressed up." The outdoor pendant is from Zangra.
Photo by Jérémie Léon

Jean-Baptiste Barache and Sihem Lamine of architecture firm Arba came up with the design based on the idea of dedans et dehors, a hybrid of indoor and outdoor space that crops up in much of their Paris studio’s work.

Blandine and her partner, Olivier Stora, the director of a dance company, bought the land in 2018, and construction ended in the summer of 2020. The ongoing pandemic has made the connection to the outdoors even more important for the couple and their two children, Elie, now age 14, and Nathan, 8.