Unique architect's house

Unique architect house This organic house between tradition and modernity was built in 1971 by architect Jean-Raphaël Hébrard for his family. Cherenda (name of the house) rises in a landscaped park of 1.2ha with swimming pool and offers an unobstructed view of the most beautiful peaks of the Basque Country. In total Cherenda is spread over nearly 670m2 in total (550 m2 habitable), and distributed on two levels. The entrance with cloakroom serves the living space of about 130 m2 consisting of a living room with fireplace and modernist integrated furniture, a dining room, a dining kitchen with pantry, an office and a mezzanine. The façade of sliding windows opens the space onto a terrace of 150 m2 with views of the panoramic landscape. The night part has 7 bedrooms in total: 3 suites on the ground floor extended by terraces, 2 suites upstairs and an independent apartment consisting of 2 bedrooms, a balcony and a bathroom. The house also benefits from a basement with storage, wine cellar and boiler room, as well as a double garage of 48 m2 and an independent building housing an artist's studio and game room. The interiors are marked by the use of oblique lines, which accentuate the impression of space and stretch the dimensions of the rooms. The vanishing lines thus drawn energize the volumes and accentuate the impression of depth. The gaze freely follows the diagonals without interruption to the landscape, thanks to the large windows. The space is considered here in a global way by integrating the circulations into the living space, for a great fluidity of use and a friendly and warm place of life. An organic house The house presents a bursting of its habitable volumes, scattered according to the topography, according to an organic plan that evokes the fluidity of the Usonian houses of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The angles closely follow the curves of the terrain and the vast roofs are gently sloping towards the ground to draw a discreet silhouette on the scale of the landscape. The oblique lines bring to the whole a great lightness, despite the massiveness of the masonry volumes with geometric design. Between tradition and modernity The architect Jean-Raphaël Hébrard signs here a modernist architecture on a human scale, reassuring and stripped of all brutality. He implements a free writing that draws on the local constructive tradition whose essence he seeks to express without pastiche, by means of modern architectural vocabulary. Thus the immense solid wood frames, the vast roofs with sides covered with canal tiles or the stone bases are all tributes to traditional Basque know-how. His approach is thus part of the movement of critical regionalism. Cherenda is a one-of-a-kind house that enjoys a privileged environment.