CARDINAL
The project consists of transforming a townhouse from the 1960s, on three levels with a garden, located in the residential district of Saint Augustin in Bordeaux.
The house has a distribution by levels inherited from uses from another era and ill-suited to current standards for a family with three children.
Only the noble floor of the last level has living rooms overlooking the garden. The two lower levels are intended primarily for service functions: garage, utility room, laundry, storage cellar and boiler.
The very deep terrace accompanied by a wide masonry staircase form an astonishing and oversized ensemble for the size of the garden. In addition, by its depth, the terrace casts a very significant shade on the two lower levels.
Inside, a load-bearing wall located in the axis of the house and over its entire depth constrains the plan of each of the levels.
The project seeks to create a new relationship with the garden to the North East by installing the brighter children's bedrooms on the ground floor by creating more generous openings.
Constrained by a limited budget, the chosen solution is to demolish the spandrels of each window to make bay windows without increasing their width with excessively expensive loads. The garden facade is lightened and a set of screens appears.
In order to take advantage of more light in the rooms, the terrace is demolished and replaced by a thinner and shallower steel walkway. The garden benefits from more space thanks to a new, more compact spiral staircase running along the facade and contributing like a light sculpture to the interior landscape of the rooms.
Inside, two load changes are necessary to reorganize the space and make the load-bearing walls disappear. This frees up on the last level a large plateau hosting a large living room, kitchen, dining room with a view and a generous master suite.
