An Impressionist painter, a collection of paintings, a heritage to pass on. In order to share this 19th-century artistic legacy with the public, the client; owner of a large bourgeois house from the same era, located in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, was considering acquiring an additional exhibition space. Embracing the long timeline of transmission, the proposed project reinterprets the original brief. Could the house itself not contain the collection and serve as its showcase? And looking further ahead, could the project’s timeline not anticipate the complete transformation of the house into a museum?

To conceive this hybrid and evolving program, blending home and foundation, the project must reconcile the intimacy of daily life with the reception of a limited audience on guided visits. To accommodate this unusual coexistence, the architecture supports a complete and respectful renovation of the house, while introducing targeted contemporary interventions for its transformation: glass canopies with bead-blasted stainless steel structures double the building's façade to organize distinct entry sequences; an interior mezzanine in Corten steel is inserted into the tall ground-floor volumes; and Burgundy limestone is used to cover both the interior and exterior floors.