Mixed-use building

Mixed-use building located in Forel (Lavaux), on ground that is neither quite town nor quite country — an activity zone at the edge of the agricultural area. Its programme answers that in-between condition directly by stacking two unlike lives in one volume: industrial premises across the first two levels, two penthouse apartments above. Rather than reconcile the two into a single character, the project lets each keep its own logic and simply layers them, so the working floors and the domestic ones read as distinct registers held within one form.

The lower two levels are conceived for maximum flexibility, so that spaces can be adapted and combined as their occupants require. To keep those floors continuous and uninterrupted, the building carries no internal stairwell to the apartments above — the one element that would otherwise fix a point in the plan and divide it. Access is pushed to the envelope instead: a shared elevator, reached directly from outside, serves the apartments, while private external staircases sit at either end of the building. Circulation to the homes is thus kept off the working floors entirely, leaving them free to be let, subdivided or recombined without a fixed vertical core running through them.

Above, the two apartments are organised around a central core that gathers the shared bathroom and kitchen units. From that core the plan offers two ways to move: along the north side, a hallway runs the full length of the apartment and connects it end to end; along the south side, movement passes through the common living areas themselves, with the kitchen acting as the pivot between dining room and living room. One route is service and passage, the other is inhabitation — the same journey read either as corridor or as a sequence of rooms.

What the building proposes is a way of keeping incompatible uses in a single frame without smoothing them into one another. By moving all access for the apartments to the outside, it protects the openness of the industrial floors below; by turning its living spaces around a central core with two parallel paths, it gives each home both a direct spine and a slower way through its shared rooms.