Private House in La Claye

The plot had been left over for as long as anyone could remember: a corner of the village that once belonged to the property next door and served it as kitchen garden and chicken run. What remained on it — a 25 m² chicken coop and a well said to be among the most productive in La Claye — was not cleared to make room for the house. atelier iso took both as fixed points, and the position of the building follows from them.

The house is aligned north–south, in line with its neighbours, and turns its gable ends towards the Rue du Lay, the same profile the village repeats along its streets. That orientation leaves the coop and the well untouched and divides the roughly 300 m² plot into two gardens of different character. At the corner, an avant-jardin acts as a threshold to the Rue du Bourg and lets the house open outward; to the west lies a second, more sheltered garden. The living space sits between them, connected to both and extending into each, with a bedroom to either side, each with an open bathroom holding a shower and washbasin and a mezzanine able to take a second double bed.

The two long façades are not treated alike. The house opens more generously to the western garden than to the eastern one, and the hierarchy is set out in the structure itself: a full structural bay on one side, a half-bay on the other. The elevations facing the public realm and the property boundaries are built in reclaimed local limestone, taken from the plot and a neighbouring parcel, so that the house reads as part of the same sequence of stone walls and gable ends that defines the street. The longitudinal façades facing the gardens are clad entirely in timber.

The structure is timber throughout, resting on an exposed polished concrete slab and set out on a regular 600 mm grid that governs both plan and elevation. Each module is marked externally by a post; between the posts, three-layer Douglas fir panels serve as both enclosure and cladding. Shutters and a pivoting entrance door in the same material let the envelope close into a single continuous surface with no openings visible. The exterior timber is treated with a silicon- and potassium-based product that weathers it towards the grey of driftwood, beneath a roof of traditional canal tiles.

Inside, poplar plywood lines the walls, partitions and built-in furniture, with plasterboard restricted to the wet rooms. Tables, the kitchen bar and the bookshelves were designed and made from offcuts left over from the build, which extends the logic of the reclaimed stone into the interior. The envelope combines the timber structure with wood-fibre insulation — 200 mm in the walls, 300 mm in the roof — and the bioclimatic strategy stays similarly plain: the east–west plan allows cross-ventilation that largely removes the need for mechanical cooling, and solar protection comes from the building's own overhangs rather than added devices, calibrated for a house occupied mainly in summer.

Apart from the earthworks, foundations and concrete slab, atelier iso built the house themselves. Self-building gave the studio direct control over the construction and allowed details to be worked out on site through trial and adjustment, so that the design continued to develop through the build rather than being fixed before it.