François

[ 2025 ]

Project type Conversion of a Parisian house into a museum
Location Paris 16th
Client Private
Area 460m2
Timeline 2025
Photographer Christophe Caudroy

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.

A know-how serving the greatest number

The architect founded Cent 15 Architecture in 2011 and immediately embarked on his first major project: the renovation of the Trianon theater in Paris (18th arrondissement). While the architect uses his fresh perspective as an asset to sharpen his skills, Cent 15 Architecture has spent the following decade patiently exploring all types of projects in Paris, the suburbs, and provinces, mastering the constraints inherent to each building and finding relevant solutions, regardless of the context of the structures to be built or their budgets.

While Cent 15 Architecture is skilled at managing large teams in all languages of Babel, it intentionally avoids taking on too many projects, as its architecture draws strength from its pursuit of perfection, its almost obsessive desire for the delivered building to be the image of the future project and the future itself.

Cent 15 Architecture is concerned with sustainability in architecture, using organic, natural, and bio-based materials. This is evident in the Tekès restaurant project, which incorporates a 10 cm thick earth slab for the restaurant floor, an earth plaster on all the walls and ceiling, rammed earth for the reception desk and the bases of the counters and benches.

The agency also focuses on implementing the most natural climate principles within the home. The 9th Avenue project, for example, involves the construction of a wooden-frame house with straw insulation, an interior earth plaster (partly sourced from the land itself), and heating generated by biomass (wood from trees felled on the property).

In rehabilitation projects, the goal is to retain as much of the existing structure as possible, reusing what is useful on-site and thus avoiding the implementation of excessive new elements. One of the agency's principles is the repurposing of certain materials (often inexpensive). The Opéra project, for example, utilizes aluminum film insulation for the façades of "call boxes," while the Papier Tigre project uses recycled corrugated fiberboard sheets as the formwork for the air conditioning motor. Each material has its own nobility, depending on how it is applied and presented.

The agency's approach is ultimately to bring architectural issues back to their core functions, with the perfectly mastered function creating the original aesthetics of a project that is always unique.