The Bel Air Estate is set within a built and natural landscape of exceptional quality, where topography, the memory of the place and the structure of the vegetation establish the very conditions for architectural intervention.
At the heart of the estate, an eighteenth-century bastide and its formal French garden define a first geography, ordered by terraces, lines and horizontal planes. In counterpoint, the wider Provençal landscape opens towards the distant and commanding presence of the Sainte-Victoire mountain. Between these two realms — the composed garden and the open territory — an olive grove anchors the site within an agricultural and Mediterranean memory.
The presence of an ancient cedar tree, overlooking the site, further deepens its temporal and landscape dimension.
Despite its immediate proximity to Aix-en-Provence, the estate seems removed from any sense of urbanity. Its gentle slope, the density of its vegetation and the autonomy of its views create a sense of retreat. The land detaches itself from the urban ground, responding instead to its own topographical logic and establishing an essential relationship with the wider landscape.
This topography becomes the founding principle of the project. Extending the base of the bastide, the contemporary intervention develops as a plinth embedded within the terrain, following a logic of compactness and restraint in order to preserve the integrity of the protected site. From the historic gardens, the architecture neither interrupts nor competes with the perception of the estate: it recedes, allowing the depth of the landscape to emerge more clearly while framing and directing views towards it.
The estate’s four patio villas are thus nestled below the garden, within the olive grove. Rather than being placed upon the land, they are embedded within its depth, concealed within the ground, the earth and the landscape. Their fan-shaped arrangement arises from a careful reading of the site: it establishes an appropriate distance and privacy for each dwelling, while opening generous views towards the wider landscape and the Sainte-Victoire.
Each villa unfolds between two complementary dimensions: the patio — an inward, protected and mineral space, a true open-air room — and the horizon, open, luminous and distant.
The project reinterprets the Mediterranean restanque — the traditional stone retaining terrace — as a contemporary form of dwelling. More than a collection of houses, it creates an inhabited topography.
The relationship between architecture and site is expressed first and foremost through material. Massive stone is its founding principle. It is not conceived as a cladding, but as thickness, mass and thermal inertia. The Bel Air villas are inhabited restanques: their walls are thick, protective and telluric. They reveal the slope, emphasise the horizontality of the terraces and establish a constructive continuity with the traditional dry-stone retaining walls of the Mediterranean landscape.
Here, natural stone gives rise to a sustainable architecture precisely because it embraces time. Ageing is understood not as deterioration, but as an anticipated quality of the project. The façades become living surfaces within the landscape, able to receive shadows, seasons, the silvery reflections of the olive trees and the traces of the climate.
Between the ordered base of the bastide, the geometry of the formal French garden and the freer presence of the olive grove, the project seeks a position of balance and precision. It does not simply add itself to the estate: it becomes its contemporary foundation.
Silent, enduring and deeply rooted, the Bel Air Estate extends the very nature of the place, reinterpreting the restanque as an architecture of thickness, shadow, measure and landscape.
