A Two Shipping Containers Turned into a Modern House for a Writer and Sculptor in Saint-Bresson

Un Dernier Voyage is a light-filled shipping container home located in Meuse, Saint-Bresson, France. It was designed by Spray Architecture & Gabrielle Vella-Boucaud, this contemporary house makes use of metal construction throughout, the interior is kept minimalist and maintains an industrial chic vibe.

by Olga Jun 5, 2020 24 Images

Spray Architecture & Gabrielle Vella-Boucaud

Un Dernier Voyage by Spray Architecture & Gabrielle Vella-Boucaud

“Un Dernier voyage” is a house project implanted on an old pasture land. You can get there by a little forest way. The ground is on the hillside, at the end of a small village and a few meters away from the edge of the woods. These woods are populated with contemporary and land works of art. Artists and designers of the whole world come in this countryside. For a long time imagined, after years of traveling in various overseas territories, “un Dernier voyage” reflects the clients various artistic influences.

She writes, he sculpts wood and metal. The house is designed as a place of creation, ideal to seek inspiration. It is at street-level, completed by a container become carving workshop. Carried by a metal structure, the volume gets off the ground and keeps its and its declivity. The plan is a twenty meter rectangle by six, widely open to favor a fluid circulation and a flexibility of interior layout. On both sides of the bedroom and bathroom, are the livingroom and an office connected by a wide corridor allowing to show sculptures. Two terraces are added to the volume; in the Southwest, a covered entrance and to the Northeast an outdoor space lengthwise the house over which goes on the metal structure in canopy.

The beautiful materiality has virtue of economy according to the brutalist principles. That is why; the ceiling shows its metal structure, its steel sheets, technical equipments and the floor its raw concrete. Outside, the black metal siding evokes the steel sheet of a container, a modest transit object but solid and very usual in overseas territories. This black monolith contrasts with the rural landscape. But its lengthened and low shape, its standing on the hill drown it in a green background. The facades are vertically drilled; either by French windows opening on the long terrace and on the rippling hills, or by fixed windows which frame the landscape and play with the crossing axis of the plan. Followed by the workshop-container implanted according to the same angle, the house seems to be doubled.

“Un Dernier voyage” is a raw housing, in a wild landscape, which echo the long travels made by the containers given up by shipping companies.

Photos courtesy of Spray Architecture & Jelena Stajic