Restoring a 200 year old farm
in the French Alps

Our meeting with the previous owners shaped the project. They were born here, grew up in this house, and their children now keep cows in the surrounding alpine pastures. We wanted to honor their legacy and remain true to the spirit of this high-altitude farm.

Our intention was a renovation guided by function before form, in line with the humility of traditional Alpine architecture and the restraint of the Shaker movement, where beauty comes from use and necessity. We wanted the renovation to sit quietly in the pasture landscape, as if it had always belonged there.

We didn’t try to erase the marks of time. We’re close to the idea of kintsugi: living with repairs and embracing them. Every detail was guided by use: simple solutions, honest materials, and volumes shaped by the place.

Our references range from Jean Touret and the Marolles school, to Pierre Chapo, including Willy Guhl (an extraordinary designer who designed the small utility vehicle that still carries our materials up the mountain, a complete coincidence).

We sourced pieces over a long period of time. The large table comes from a monastery and dates back to the 1950s; the kitchen benches were salvaged from the church of Montreuilau-Lion, north of Paris. We like pairing Maison Regain pieces (French mountain furniture from the 1960s to the 1980s) with Noguchi lamps.

Antoine Ricardou is an architect and designer, and the founder of the studio Grand Bureau. His work operates at the intersection of architecture, design, interior environments, and art direction. He develops a functionalist approach – form follows function – where shapes emerge directly from use and place.

His passion for the mountains runs throughout his career. For many years, he has collaborated with emblematic outdoor brands such as Zag Skis in Chamonix and Millet Mountain, and he has recently acquired, with his partners, La Librairie des Alpes, one of the oldest bookshops in Paris, dedicated to alpine culture. This farm became another way of continuing that relationship with altitude, landscape, and craftsmanship.

Gwenaelle Grandjean is an architect and landscape designer. Her work focuses on revealing the intrinsic qualities of a site – its topography, circulations, horizons, and plant dynamics – in order to develop projects whose form emerges above all from function and use. Gwenaelle favors an attentive, contextual, and sustainable approach, where interventions are carried out with restraint. She has developed a particular expertise in Mediterranean gardens without irrigation, working with resilient local species and accepting seasonal variations.

Her projects lie at the meeting point of landscape and architecture, seeking a simple, honest, and essential expression. She has, for instance, worked on Hôtel des Roches Rouges in Saint-Raphaël, the garden of Bastide du Galinier in Lourmarin, and the flower fields for Fragonard in Grasse.