The first sign of occupancy on the site was a small shepherd’s cabanon, with a tall, civic-looking palm tree positioned in the front. Interestingly, this was the best relationship to a magnificent view looking through the saddle of the hills towards the Massif des Maures and beyond to the Mediterranean. The image was briefly glimpsed in an estate agent’s window, and then following a site visit an offer was made and accepted.
We became owners of two acres of hillside overlooking Bargemon named Les Adrets (sunny side of the mountain), a hillside that had been cultivated with olives for more than two thousand years.
Although it would have been dynamic to build against the contours, building height restrictions of six metres prohibited this. The stepped terracing of drystone walls was a more obvious clue. An early inspiration was the Italian villa/garden tradition, where the slope of the land intersects with precise terraces and where the discipline of the contours encouraged ideas of linearity. In some cases these are pushed to the extreme, strips of building and garden shearing against each other. The plan of the Villa Gamberaia, immortalised by the drawings in Shepherd and Jelllicoe’s 1925 book “Italian Gardens of the Renaissance”, was noted, as was the less well-known work of Cecil Pinsent. His Villa Le Balze (1913) above Florence demonstrates how the limitations of the topography act as a generator for a linear plan.
Within this idea and the ever-presence of the south-facing view, the design of the house seems almost inevitable. In plan, the sequence of entrance salon, loggia, living room and pool court are all connected enfilade. The south side of all these spaces relates to a 60-metre-long pergola which, apart from forming a promenade, acts as a frame to the garden and the view. This introduces the topic of the house as a mechanism to view the landscape.
The main bedroom and three guest rooms are logically positioned on the first floor, accessed by two stairs at either end of the house – one from the front door and one directly from the poolside. This creates a circuit of circulation in plan and section which includes a “bridge” overlooking the loggia. The finished materials are simple. Floors are stone paving on the ground level and regionally typical terracotta tiles upstairs; walls are white painted plaster on blockwork; vanity units are in white Carrara marble; worktops are stainless steel; and the freestanding cabinets and refectory table and in European oak.
We relied heavily on the local skills of masonry, concrete, terracing, carpentry, and tiling. Anything more sophisticated would have to come from elsewhere. The W20 steel French doors and windows were made in England and the stainless worktops came from Sweden. The section of the house with its one room depth allowed for effective cross-ventilation, and added to this the walls were built with 400mm-thick terracotta hollow blocks, giving excellent insulation.
The site foreman was a key person. He understood the spirit of the design and had total control of the site. Ritual topping out and completion parties were enthusiastically observed.
The garden design developed as a series of parallel strips, based on the existing terraces; stone paving for the ground floor of the house and its courtyards; a 60-metre-long pergola of 250mm diameter in-situ concrete columns with Canadian cedar beams; an 80-metre-long lawn in front of the house and rough meadow grass for the terrace below. Lines of plumbago, lavender and rosemary were planted in 60-80-metre lengths separating these spaces. Vine and jasmine were cultivated alternately on the bays of the pergola and 12 cypress trees were planted to extend the pergola to the west. Given the intense heat in the summer, we were very fortunate to have a source of water on site from the mountain above. A basin was built to collect the water at the east end of the lawn and an irrigation system installed.
To the south there are views from the loggia to the Massif des Maures mountains 30 kilometres away and to the north to the top of the Col du Bel Homme where hang-gliders can be seen graphically suspended in the blue.
In the east-west direction the public rooms, internal and external, are composed in a line, with views from the salon to the loggia, then to the living room and concluding in the court of the swimming pool. At one end is water, at the other is the fireplace.
Since practical completion of the house, additional small works have been carried out which have embedded the project further into its setting: walls and gates, and the insertion of discreet staircases to establish convenient connections.
The introduction of small white walls by Duiker and Biljvoet at the Zonnestraal sanatorium at Hilversum remain relatively obscure but lasting reference observed by Peter Smithson in “The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture”: “It is, I think, because they had a purity and a faith that we find almost too hard to bear, it shines out of the smallest detail, the windows for example at Zonnestraal, and the small white walls round the trees”.
Here, the additional white walls, steps and balustrades extend the field of the house further into the immediate landscape. This accumulative process results in an outcome not necessarily imagined at the commencement.
The cypress trees which extend the pergola to the west are already taller than the house. The Long Lawn, which began life as an abstract idea, 80 metres long and 8 metres wide, has become a place for games, from croquet to archery, and not unlike a Roman hippodrome, for trials of speed for men and dogs.
The telescopic idea, whereby the building increases in height in four stages from east to west, conclude in the emerging monumental cypress trees.
The building, once starkly white against the landscape and locally nicknamed L’hôpital, has been sandblasted by a decade of sirocco winds from north Africa, and turned into Provencal cream. This allowed us to continue to paint the “outside” rooms white, by way of contrast. The villa has withdrawn its presence, providing an armature for the vines and cypress trees which extend the axis. The olive plantation joins the now anarchic growth of linear hedges, while the introduction of lemon trees has transformed part of the pergola into a lemonaie. The 80-metre-long lawn is routinely and meticulously cut.