The project began from a need: to give an architecture practice a place of its own, permanence, a space to create, to meet clients and, in time, to welcome a team. The answer appeared on a plot where there was only a garage with a two-pitched colonial roof. The plot sits in a residential neighbourhood in a rural municipality, surrounded by country houses. This territory was not a limit to work around, but the starting point for the siting of the building.

A Language That Comes From the Place
The first definition of the project was one of coherence: to respect the characteristics of the surroundings and of the existing building, rather than bringing into a neighbourhood of houses a language foreign to the place. As this is the headquarters of a practice that designs for both living and working in the countryside, it made sense for the building itself to communicate that same repertoire: a comfortable everyday setting for those who spend their days working there, and a welcoming one for those who come to discuss their project.

That choice also resolved a question of use: thinking of the space purely as an office, in a predominantly residential context, would limit its permanence to a single function over time. Designing it with the character of a house opened room for a reversibility that became the backbone of the project.

A Plan Designed for Real Use
The plan responds with equal ease to two programmes. The space used for reception and the team's desks can just as comfortably become a living room with a dining table. The kitchenette already holds the full infrastructure of a complete kitchen. The bathroom is not a guest cloakroom, it is a full bathroom, sized as it would be in a house. And the meeting room has exactly the proportions of a bedroom.

This reversibility ensures that the space continues to make sense over time, whatever use it comes to have, a way of thinking about permanence, not only about square metres.

Materiality and Atmosphere
The residential identity extends into the choice of materials, into furniture that carries no trace of an office, and into the landscaping that surrounds the building. A veranda on the front facade mediates the passage between outside and inside, a feature common to the region's country houses and rare in corporate settings, which here helps to build an atmosphere of pause even before entering.

The Office as Experience
In everyday life, the space has become part of the experience of the project itself: it is where clients come to feel, in practice, the dimensions, the use of materials and the balance of a contemporary architecture, in style and in real needs, set within the countryside, in a small interior town. More than a headquarters, it is the built demonstration of a way of looking at territory: an architecture that relates to the place without giving up the contemporary life organised within it.