A Modern house remodeled and adapted. At 35, the owner decided to repurchase his parents the house of his childhood. Young father of a girl, he wanted to give his daughter the same happy environment in which he grew up, in front of the castle of Versailles. «You can't be closer,» explains Guillaume Gibert, from the RMGB study. The architect carried out an important reform to rethink the interior of the house, so that the owner could make his adult («instead of creating a museum of family memories»), focusing on two main areas. The first, imposed by the Versailles City Council, meant fulfilling a precise specifications, since the property is very close to the castle. «We work hard around these demands,» explains Guillaume Gibert. The second conditioning, this time aesthetic, was chosen by the architect himself to respond better to the expectations of his client: «We wanted to rediscover the house's DNA recovering its original volumes,» he explains. That is why he struggled to return his letters of nobility to space, creating at the same time a contemporary environment.
A tribute to the kings of France
RMGB began to rebuild the original house of the house and eliminate the necessary partitions. The dining room, separated from the kitchen by the owner's family, became a large diaphanous living room. Similarly, the little ones storage spaces From each landing of the central staircase, which had been closed by the previous occupants, they were rehabilitated to return their practicality. «Next, we analyzed what materials should be preserved, in particular the magnificent parquet in spike,» explains Guillaume Gibert, who took the drawing of the ground and made it reproduce identically. “Once the investigation was done, we asked ourselves how we could intervene in the house. The answer: we did not want to touch the housing, so there is nothing embedded in the walls. Everything is in place, such as when the kings of France moved constantly. They had their own furniture, which they placed every time they reached a castle. So everything has been designed at the scale of furniture, rather than integrated distribution. ”
Subtle references to the castle of Versailles
The entrance immediately announces the classicism of the house, with its moldings on the ceiling. «We wanted to give it a little dynamism with contemporary aluminum furniture,» explains Guillaume Gibert. We broke with classicism with very clean and sharp lines, barely worked. “Unlike the original interior, the parquet has been given a contemporary finish, smoked with red varnish reflexes. Mirrors were also added in a wink to the Versailles mirrors, creating a deconstructed reflection by mirrors of different sizes. As the house is in front of the castle, it was difficult not to make a reference to it, without being too demonstrative. Around the staircase, the parquet floor reveals a reason for Corola, skillfully referring to the influence of the Sun King. ”
The room perfectly illustrates the will of the study to install the furniture in a classical way, without integrating them into the wall. «The owners needed a bar furniture, so instead of integrating an entire wall with storage furniturewe design a Scandinavian wooden wood sideboard and place it at the end of the room. The objective was not to distort the original volumes breaking the perspective lines of the rooms, but to let them breathe leaving margins along the furniture. To enhance the room of the room, RMGB punctuated the space with acid colors and broke with the classicism of the stay with a contemporary sofa, a table and a contemporary sofa, a brutalist resin table and a carpet designed to measure, again in a nod to the real influence.
A constant balance between the classic and the contemporary
The dining room, divided into two, has become a large diaphanous room. After reproducing their original moldings and parquet, the architects «worked with islands», as in the rest of the house. At the end of the kitchen, a large stainless steel furniture, manufactured by a hardware store, contains all the functions of the room (plate, oven, extractor bell). The scamoteable doors transform the kitchen furniture into an ultracontemporaneous closet, while retaining a classic design with embedded doors and fitted frame. This will for material purity extends to the solid island of gross stone, and the white enameled lava table of purified lines. «We wanted to give the impression that the furniture was made with raw materials, but with a refined design, to match the aesthetics of this Modern house«, says Guillaume Gibert. The acidulated notes, signing of the renewal, arouse the space through the Aubusson tapestry, worked as a watercolor, or the Willy Rizzo chairs of the 70s, retouched in an intense green velvet.