Domaine Bel Air
The Bel Air domain, comprising four villas, is set within a landscape of both built and unbuilt elements, where the topography, the memory of place and the vegetation form the very basis of the architectural intervention.
Within this domain, an 18th-century bastide and French-style garden compose the first geographic zone, ordered by terraces, traces and horizontals. The grandeur of the Provençal landscape stands in counterpoint, opening onto the distant and sovereign presence of Montagne Sainte-Victoire.
Between these two registers, the one of the ordered garden, and the one of open land, stands an olive grove recalling the site’s agricultural and Mediterranean history. The presence of an ancient cedar tree overlooking the terrain enhances the temporal and landscaped depth of the place.
Although in close proximity to Aix-en-Provence, the domain seems removed from any urban setting. Its gentle slope, the density of vegetation and the autonomy of its views produce a form of retreat. The terrain is detached from the urban epidermis, belonging only to its own topographical logic, in an essential relation with the broader landscape.
This topography constitutes the project’s underlying principle. Extending from the base of the Bastide, a contemporary intervention extends the substructure, following the logic of compacity and restraint, in order to preserve the integrity of the listed site. From the historic gardens, the architecture neither interrupts nor competes with the perception of the domain, rather it fades out to better underscore the depth of the landscape and to orient views.
The domain’s four villas with patios are slipped in below the garden, in the midst of the olive grove. They are inscribed in its thickness and concealed in the soil, the earth, and the landscape.
Laid out in an array, they result from an attentive analysis of the site. They create for each house the right distance, and privacy, whilst broadly orienting the views toward the wider landscape and the Montagne Sainte-Victoire.
Each villa exists between two complementary dimensions: the one of the patio, an interior, protected, mineral space, and a genuine bedroom in the open air; and the one of the horizon, open, luminous, and distant.
The project reinterprets the figure of “restanques”, the ubiquitous Mediterranean agricultural terracing, as a contemporary form of inhabiting. More than an ensemble of homes, it composes an inhabited topography.
The relation between the architecture and the site passes first through the material. Solid stone constitutes the founding principle. It is not a cladding but rather a thickness, an inert mass. The Bel Air villas are inhabited restanques.
Here, the wall is thick, protective, and telluric. It reveals the slope, magnifies the horizontality of the terraces and settles the architecture into a constructive continuity with the traditional dry-stone retaining walls.
Here, natural stone engages durable architecture because it shoulders the passage of time. Its process of aging is not an alteration but a projected quality. The façades become living supports for the landscape, capable of welcoming shadows, the seasons, the silvery reflections of the olive trees and the traces of the climate.
Between the ordered base of the bastide, the geometry of the French-style garden and the more open presence of the olive grove, the project seeks just the right position. It doesn’t add to the domain, but rather it becomes a contemporary base.
Silent, immutable, and deeply anchored, the villas of the Bel Air domain enhance the very nature of the place and reinterpret the restanque as an architecture of thickness, shadow, measure and landscape.
