The house is located on the heights of the left bank of Sion, below the village of Salins, on a flat in the middle of an apricot orchard. The construction is composed of 2 elements; a concrete base managing the topography of the land on which rests the volume of the wooden dwelling. One of the particularities of the project is to have developed day and night spaces on a single level. This distribution of the program was decisive for the establishment of the building on the property line to the south-east and the development of a rational distribution of interior spaces in order to preserve a maximum of green outdoor spaces. The existing road to the north is preserved, the vehicle access space reduced to the maximum.
The lower floor accommodates the technique, the cellar, the garage, the entrance and its gardenobe as well as a versatile room for play, drawing and music. The staircase then invites you to climb into the main day area; the living room opens onto the apricot garden to the southwest. The plan is structured by a central supporting wall defining a day zone to the west and a night zone and services to the east. The sequence of spaces was particularly studied in order to obtain an open and fluid plan. The kitchen is treated as a piece of furniture. While structuring the living space of the dining area, it reveals the continuity of the ceiling from the façade to the central load-bearing wall, thus offering multiple spatial perspectives and internal relationships. These evasions are all the more important as one perceives, wherever one is, a beginning of another space. The house is designed in this way to promote exchanges, communication while offering the necessary privacy and tranquility.
The dining area and the library-office benefit from the framing on the plain, on the castles of Valère and Tourbillon and on the mountain range to the north. These perspectives and external relations with an opening over the whole width and the height of the house contribute to the reading of the dimensions of the rooms that go well beyond the facades and accentuates the generosity of the spaces. The rooms are distributed by an exhibition corridor making phonic buffer. The partition wall contains custom-made wall cabinets that open from the bedroom side to the circulation side for household storage. The windows of the rooms have been positioned at an ideal height so that the child who plays on the ground, who rests on his bed or who studies in the office, benefits from a framing on apricot trees.
The floors, walls and ceilings are constructed of glulam wood frame and insulated with mineral wool. The vertical interior wall coverings are made of white Fermacell panels while the horizontal elements as the ceiling and floor are made of larch wood. For the facade, the choice was made on an exterior insulation of facade in wood wool coated with a mineral plaster for economic reasons and in order to absorb the noise nuisances of the airfield below. The vegetated roof was thought as the fifth facade with an integration into the apricot landscape from the top of the neighboring plots. It also acts as a water retention and helps to increase inertia and thus protect against both heat in summer and cold in winter. In general, the external expression of facade has been directed towards a search for simplicity and abstraction through the application of the internal needs and the internal-external relations of the living spaces.
The concept of sustainable development has been integrated since the beginning of the design with particular attention to the general economy of construction with the establishment and rational form of housing, and a reduction in operating costs through the application of healthy (breathing) and recyclable materials. The excellent thermal insulation makes this house a very low-energy home.
