Project Name: LARUNS

Location: Laruns, Ossau Valley, France

Design Team: Mesnil Architectures

Floor Area: 150 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Mesnil Studio

Design Features: At the southern end of the Ossau Valley, where the terrain opens toward the Pyrenees, Mesnil Architectures has transformed a former automobile repair workshop into a 150-square-metre artist's residence. The building's unusual ground-floor height and the former office space above together defined the terms of the intervention. When successive layers of finishes and suspended ceilings were stripped away, a timber-framed structure re-emerged at its original generous proportions, its accumulated traces of former use becoming the raw material for a new spatial narrative.

The project's most significant contribution lies in its uncompromising application of a non-additive tectonic ethic. Every dismantled component was systematically catalogued, cleaned, and stored before being redeployed within the new design: former floorboards return as ceiling finishes and drawer fronts; joists are reborn as outdoor furniture and a woodshed; a miller's ladder, reused as interior vertical circulation, becomes an object of quiet spatial poetry. This working method resonates directly with the clients' artistic practice of collecting and repurposing old canvases into new works. The building thus becomes a reorganised assembly of existing components rather than a consumptive act of new construction.

At the facade, the discovery of a concrete portal frame — a remnant of the former vehicle entrance — informed a decisive widening of the opening, drawing natural light deep into the building's core. Alongside the garden, a timber structure and a wide metal-clad overhang extend the domestic space outward. At roof level, a mansard volume drawn from Bearn vernacular typology frames a cabin-like upper room resting directly on the existing principal rafters, oriented toward the mountains. To the south, a terrace reinterprets the traditional Ossau gallery, establishing a sheltered year-round outdoor threshold between interior life and the surrounding landscape.

The interior organisation demonstrates equally disciplined spatial reasoning. A new staircase positioned against the north elevation liberates the south-facing living spaces, allowing them to unfold as a single continuous volume from the entrance vestibule through to the garden, uniting kitchen, studio, and living area within one through-space. Beneath the stair, an alternating-tread stair leads to the existing cellar, repurposed as a naturally ventilated pantry. On the upper level, bedrooms and bathroom are consolidated in a row, with a corner living room opening onto a continuous balcony. The roof-level room, set within the timber frame, establishes double-height spatial relationships and is reached by the reused miller's ladder, forming the most narratively charged spatial moment in the house.

The result is a residence that is simultaneously ancient and entirely contemporary, one that redefines, through precise tectonic restraint and deep respect for existing material, the spatial and ethical ambitions available to adaptive reuse architecture against the backdrop of the Pyrenean landscape.

Design Team: Mesnil Architectures was founded in 2022 by Antonin Bohl, Mathias Lefebvre, and Arthur Schmitt, operating from two offices located in Paris (10 rue de la Mare, 75020) and Chatellerault (10 rue de la Bastille, 86100). The three founding principals are united by a shared attentiveness to the built environment and a sustained curiosity toward existing structures, forming the foundation of the practice's distinctive methodological approach.

The practice focuses on rehabilitation, extension, and new-build commissions, consistently engaging with questions of tectonic logic, programme, and long-term material durability. Its professional position aligns closely with the rehabilitation-first principles embedded in France's 1977 Architecture Act, advocating for the reuse, repair, and adaptive transformation of existing fabric as a normative mode of architectural production rather than a marginal alternative.

In 2024, the firm was selected for the Echelle Un incubator at the Ecole d'Architecture de la Ville et des Territoires Paris-Est, a programme dedicated to supporting emerging architectural practices in France, affirming the studio's growing recognition within the French and international architectural community. Founded only three years prior, Mesnil Architectures has already established a clear critical position in the field of architectural rehabilitation and material ethics, with projects including LARUNS attracting sustained attention across international architectural media.