Japanese minimalism finds a home in France in the elegant simplicity of the Bee House
Budding architect Timothee Mercier was commissioned by his Hong Kong-based interior designer mother, Eve, to build the guest house on family land
Nearby, however, on the 25-hectare family plot, stood a “ruin” surrounded by beehives. And tantalisingly close – at the family table, in fact – sat Timothee, the eldest Mercier child and a budding architect. Opportunity buzzed.
“I remember being on vacation with my parents and them looking towards me at lunch and asking if I wanted to build a house,” he says. “I thought they were absolutely crazy to trust me with such a project when I was 22 years old and not even in architecture school yet.”
Now 26, with 10 months to go before completing a master’s degree in architecture at New York’s Columbia University, Timothee is my guide around the deceptively simple guest house he designed for his parents, 500 metres from their main residence.
“The old house had no foundations and the entire thing had to be torn down,” he says, referring to a small barn home whose age has been lost in time. Its replacement, the “Bee House”, completed two years ago, is a 1,500 sq ft, two-storey dwelling built partly with salvaged limestone. The reconstruction also respected the building’s original footprint and envelope.
But despite initial appearances – exposed stone walls on the outside, rectangular shape, sloping roofs, south-facing facade – this is no typical Provençal house. For starters, the openings reveal a different approach to shading: instead of wooden shutters, slightly protruding window boxes, in concrete, provide sun protection. And far from anything traditional and rustic, the interiors are contemporary and, as Timothee describes them, “monastic”.
