Arles - Villa Vaché
- department: Bouches-du-Rhône
- commune: Arles
- naming: Villa Vaché
- address: 50 bis avenue de Hungary
- Author: Paul QUINTRAND (architect)
- date: 1965-1966
- protection: unprotected building
- label patrimoine XXe: Commission régionale du patrimoine et des sites (CRPS) du 3 July 2012
Villa Vaché was built in 1965-1966, in the Trébon district of Arles, by the architect Paul Quintrand (born 1929), at the request of a couple of doctors living in Arles. This order is the result of an architectural encounter. In 1964, the couple discovered the Villa Merland that Paul Quintrand was building for one of their confreres in the rice field area east of Arles towards Montmajour. The contemporary lines of Villa Merland – a villa heavily influenced by Le Corbusier – attract the attention of the Vaché couple who also want to embark on a single-family house construction project. They therefore came into contact with Paul Quintrand and, seduced by the conceptual approach that he proposed, entrusted him with the project.
As is often the case for private housing during the 1960s, the Vaché villa will be a program conducive to the architect’s experiments. This order is for Paul Quintrand exceptional and will be one of his most accomplished achievements. The great freedoms given by the project owners will allow him to explore his participatory approach, including the sponsors at the heart of the architectural project. It integrates into the project their wishes: a functional house, a free distribution, a sunny and modern living room, a garden that extends the habitat.
Paul Quintrand imagines a shelter that preserves its privacy but lets nature in. It adopts a square plan (13.60 x 13.60 m), is developed on three levels (ground floor, intermediate level partial, floor, or a height of 8.20 m). It is covered by a partially accessible roof terrace.
The proposal of Paul Quintrand is to animate and dematerialize the parallelepiped volume of the house by playing on the solid and the empty, on the projecting and the recessed elements, on the horizontal and vertical lines, both in plane and in elevation. It empties the southwest corner of the villa to form a patio (a quarter of the ground right-of-way) delimited by thin concrete columns. Paul Quintrand brings together the four elements: earth (planting), air, fire (outside chimney), water (fountain). This «exterior-interior» is enlivened by the course of the sun which penetrates through the oval hole of the terrace.
The Vaché couple asked the architect to draw the main pieces of equipment and decoration. Paul Quintrand designed the living room furniture (only the fixed elements remain because of the 2003 floods) and involved several artists in the project. Max Sauze (born 1933), artist, is the author of the aluminum chandelier of the dining room (model Orion), the firewall of the living room fireplace and the fountain for the patio basin. Paul Quintrand asked Jean-Pierre (aka Ernest) Boursier-Mougenot to advise the architect on the design of the claustra made of cement pipes.
Villa Vaché is now in a state close to its original state. It is always occupied by its sponsors who make sure to keep it consistent.
- Source: Inventory study of the architectural and urban production of Arles and Tarascon (13) from 1900 to 1980, drac paca/ Eléonore Marantz-Jaen, 2010
Read also in Heritage of the 20th century, the study Arles, city and architecture of the 20th century