Blog Archives

CHAI DE Château Bachen

40800 Aire sur l’Adour, Landes, France
1991

The Château de Bachen, located on eight hectares of vineyards and forest oak and beech, is the setting for this project located on the north side of a hill overlooking the Vallée de l?Adour.
The bulk of the spaces designed for vineyard activities, production and packaging of the wine of Tursan have been organized around an abandoned barn located a few meters away from the private home of the owners. The owners, Christine and Michel Guérard, wanted to preserve the existing architectural harmony of the site while providing privacy for their family life.
The project is unified as a result of the use of construction materials and methods inspired by local traditional architecture such as stone, roman concrete, Génoise tiles, etc.

The creation of a bottom level dedicated to the agricultural machinery results in a separation of professional activities and private life. On the upper level, the renovated barn has been transformed into a space dedicated to the storage of the grapes and the fermenting room. The barrel cellar, the wine-tasting room and the storage area for the bottles are located 5 meters below, linked by an interior staircase leading to a working area accessible through a long ramp. A system of steps links this area to the vineyard, facing the main façade, which then becomes the background of an open-air theater.

Maison Brana

Chais de vignification

64220 Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France
1992

When the Brana family decided to plant twenty hectares of new vineyard on a steep terrain located above Saint Jean Pied de Port in the French Basque country, they had in mind to create an underground wine warehouse topped by a little shelter to welcome visitors.
After discovering the unique beauty of the site, surrounded by the red and green mountains that form the natural border between France and Spain, we proposed to design the family home on top of the wine warehouses in the location that was originally intended for the visitor shelter.

And so was born this red house project inspired by the casa « torre », a traditional building style still present in the Spanish Basque country. A team of stonecutters was in charge of cladding the concrete structure – using a traditional method – employing the local red stone, which is rarely used for construction nowadays.
The original project included the design of a Pelote Basque court on the terrace roof of the underground wine warehouses, but this element of the project was omitted after the death of the head of the family. The rest of the project was consistent with the original proposal; access to the fermenting room and the barrel cellars is provided directly from the outside, or from the reception room located at ground level via a staircase that provides access to all levels from the cellars to the rooms located on the second floor.

Chai de Château Faugères

33330 Saint-Emilion, Gironde, France
1993

The vineyard of Saint Emilion, registered as a cultural heritage site, is characterized by its stone and tile architecture employing simple and practical geometric shapes.
In accordance with the new goals established for quality in the methodology applied to wine making, it was necessary to double the surface of the existing wine warehouses. The addition is a building 75m in length and 10 m in width with a large nave made of stone and tiles. This allows a visual continuity on the exterior, treated in exposed concrete or waxed and with stainless steel on the interior. This adds a contemporary dimension to the building, acknowledging new technologies applied to the trade of winemaking.

With an east-west orientation along its length, the new fermenting room creates a semi-enclosed courtyard between the existing buildings. The extension of the roof, which is supported by arcades located on the south side, creates a gallery that can accommodate the traditional celebrations inherent to wine making. Access at harvest time is provided via a monumental door on the north side, at the scale of the landscape it faces. All parts of the wine warehouse are accessible from the main hall: fermenting room, laboratory, storage and bottling, barrel cellar and offices on the ground floor, wine tasting room and upper level access pathway. From the outside, the visitor cannot distinguish between the new architecture and the old; the new buildings are integrated with the existing architecture as if they had always been there. The contrast is particularly striking when one progressively discovers the interiors of the buildings.

VERGELEGEN WINERY

SOMMERSET WEST, AFRIQUE DU SUD

1993

When the Brana family decided to plant twenty hectares of new vineyard on a steep terrain located above Saint Jean Pied de Port in the French Basque country, they had in mind to create an underground wine warehouse topped by a little shelter to welcome visitors.
After discovering the unique beauty of the site, surrounded by the red and green mountains that form the natural border between France and Spain, we proposed to design the family home on top of the wine warehouses in the location that was originally intended for the visitor shelter.

 And so was born this red house project inspired by the casa « torre », a traditional building style still present in the Spanish Basque country. A team of stonecutters was in charge of cladding the concrete structure – using a traditional method – employing the local red stone, which is rarely used for construction nowadays.
The original project included the design of a Pelote Basque court on the terrace roof of the underground wine warehouses, but this element of the project was omitted after the death of the head of the family. The rest of the project was consistent with the original proposal; access to the fermenting room and the barrel cellars is provided directly from the outside, or from the reception room located at ground level via a staircase that provides access to all levels from the cellars to the rooms located on the second floor.

Chai de Chateau Pichon Longueville

33250, Pauillac, Gironde, France
1993

In 1988, AXA Millésimes, the new owner, organizes an architectural competition via the Centre Georges Pompidou for the design of new wine growing buildings. The goal is to rethink the organization of the installations at Château Pichon-Longueville, which must evolve toward a coherent ensemble adapted to new technologies in terms of wine making while responding to the development – recent development at the time of the project – of tourism in the region. Of all the existing buildings on the site, we have retained only the “château” itself since it is the image that is displayed on the bottles’ labels, more precisely the « Les Tourelles de Longueville ».

Our proposal was based on the analysis of the surrounding landscape, and our goal was to make our project an extension of the landscape.

Therefore, the wall that is surrounding the vineyards along the « route des châteaux », has been transformed into buildings which accentuate the dominant horizontal aspect of the landscape of Médoc, and positions the château in the axis of the composition. Deriving our inspiration from the doors, sculptures and windows which punctuate the walls in the town of Saint-Julien, the crown of the surrounding walls of the new wine warehouses established at the height of the first cornice of the castle – is used as a support for various architectural elements to indicate different major points of circulation, creating a series of « frames in the sky ».