Henfel weekend house

Also called the Henfel house, the weekend house at La Celle-Saint-Cloud was a project that Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret handled with the utmost discretion. The client, Henry Félix, headed the Henfel company as chief executive and advised Charles de Beistégui on his finances; Le Corbusier had fitted out an apartment for Beistégui on the Champs-Élysées.

It can no longer be recognised today: many alterations have changed it, among them an extension and the loss of the glass bricks and the Catalan vaults.

The house was built in the corner of a triangular plot, a position chosen by the architects. In reinforced concrete and composed of several single-storey modules, it stood only 2.60 m high. Its facades combined millstone and Nevada glass bricks; its roof, made of what are called Catalan vaults, was pierced by light cannons and covered with greenery. In the garden, at the end of a bay, a separate module served as a kiosk and repeated the Catalan-vault principle.

The interior was organised around a brick fireplace in the middle of a roomy open-plan living room, whose walls were whitewashed or clad in plywood boards. The fireplace played both a structural and a storage role. White porcelain tiles covered the floor.

Private house, heavily altered.