About

Designing space, inhabiting the world

 

 "As an architect, my job is to give shape to everyday life, to create spaces where everyone can find their place. Each project is a new adventure, a technical and human challenge.

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"An encounter, a name, a dream"

 

 It was in sixth form that I discovered the word architect. Through the story of a classmate and her mother, an architect whose name had a fascinating allure.

At the time, I didn't yet appreciate the scope of this profession, but it had a kind of grandeur, mystery and beauty that left an indelible mark on me and has never left me.

This word came to meet my passion for drawing, my taste for old buildings, then more contemporary ones, and above all the teachers who knew how to make me love the arts and words.

 

Later, when I started my studies, it was another architect, Patrice R, the father of a friend who is still very close to me, who, despite trying to dissuade me, reinforced this passion in me, pushing me to confront the reality of the profession with even more desire and determination.

 Thanks to them, I was able to link these childhood intuitions to a professional path, and I ended up forcing fate.

 

An off-the-beaten-track path

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My path has been anything but linear. For a long time, school and I turned our backs on each other without understanding each other. But I've learnt patience, rigour and above all: that nothing is set in stone. I failed, tried again, persevered. I also learnt a trade in joinery, a passion that I still have for materials and details.

 

I love this living substance that fuels my creativity and my thinking. It is shaped by materials, rules, places and customs, and is constantly evolving.

What excites me is that no two projects are identical.

 

A way of listening

 

I sometimes talk a lot, but I listen even more. What touches me in each project is what people don't always say in words: silences and gestures are also a language.

 

My work always starts with that: understanding the programme, of course, but above all the human element. For a flat, a shop or a public place, I try to create a space that feels good. Not just beautiful: right. In its place. For those who are going to live, work or pass through it.

 

Even in larger programmes, I try to imagine architecture as an everyday scene. The movements, the framing, the materials, the lighting: it all has to be part of a balance. Like a choreography.

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Projects that leave a mark

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 Some projects leave a mark. One of them is the administrative centre in Berre, designed for a colleague: I was given carte blanche to design a contemporary renovation on three scales: the user, the worker and the passer-by.

 

Another, more personal project was the refurbishment of a flat in Marseille. Passionate, atypical clients, a precise and complicit dialogue. I had to find a form of luxurious discretion, where every detail counts, without ostentation.

 

Today

 

What drives me?

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Putting my technical skills and experience to good use on sensitive, made-to-measure projects, where people and place count. I'd like to explore more contemporary architecture, without ever betraying the site or the people who live there.

Design draws the plan, people make life.

 

This phrase, at the head of the site, sums up a conviction: the plan gives structure, but it's the uses, the gestures, the paths of life that really give meaning to architecture.

Space is only alive through those who live in it.

Drawing means preparing a framework. But the real project begins when places come alive - when people take them over, transform them, imbue them with their history.

 

It is in this meeting between intention and life that architecture finds its rightness.

Creating the possible. Drawing reality. Listening to how things are used. And always offering something extra.