“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.

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.

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.

Blandine calls the open second floor the home’s grande pièce. The chalet-like space contains a kitchen, a two-desk office, a dining area, and a cozy living area. A robust exposed-timber structure and straightforward, wooden built-in furniture help demarcate the different zones.

The kids enjoy climbing the various ladders—one of which doubles as a bookshelf—down to the ground floor or up to the mezzanine. During the dark days of winter, Blandine uses the smooth parquet floor as a yoga studio. The space is the home’s core and heart.

But the residence’s most striking feature is the crown of windows that wraps three sides of the upper level. A chain of roughly one-and-a-half-foot-wide, seven-foot-tall larch louvers—lined up like dominoes and seeming to stretch out over the wall to the street—creates a dramatic flip-book effect, both for those passing by and for the residents inside.

At night, Blandine says, the shutters emit an orange glow. “There’s an inner light that’s very beautiful,” she says. “Jean-Baptiste had it in his head that this would be not only a house but an artistic object in the city, a little bit like a sculpture.”

“We always want to feel the carpentry in our projects. Our goal here was to show the wood of the structure as much as possible.”
—Jean-Baptiste Barache, architect

On the lower level, the house is more intimate; windows are restricted to the narrow doors that lead from each bedroom to the garden. The ceiling is relatively low, and the floors are heated. The ambience is subdued, offering a balance to the liveliness upstairs.

“In the beginning, I was saying that I would like to have windows and light everywhere,” says Blandine, but Barache encouraged a contrast between the upper and lower levels. It was a choice the family came to especially appreciate during last summer’s heat wave.

Obtaining construction approval for such a distinctive structure was not an easy task. Because the residence lies near a 14th-century church, the owners needed a thumbs-up from an Architecte des Bâtiments de France, a state official charged with preserving the country’s historical sites.

“Even though we can’t see the church from here, we are within its historical protection perimeter—it’s very French,” says Blandine, suppressing a laugh. The design ultimately received the bureaucratic blessing.

Its sculptural qualities aside, the house has given Blandine a sense of security. “My work came to a full stop during the pandemic,” she says. “I couldn’t perform at all.” And her forest fantasy has taken on a Swiss Family Robinson dimension, particularly on the home’s second floor, where the open plan is anchored by a rotatable woodstove.

“I looked for a long time for a woodstove that I could cook with,” Blandine says. “It reassures me to know that if the world collapsed, I could still keep warm. We have water from a cistern outside and a little garden to grow things.”

She pauses for a moment as she sits in her dining room and then adds, “Maybe I wouldn’t really survive, but I like to imagine that I could.”

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Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Arba

Structural Engineering: Konstruktif / @konstruktif2851

Civil Engineering: Effilios

Carpentry: Tosco (+33.6.64.89.28.35)

Carpentry: Joly & Co

Carpentry: Égoïne