Hasta La Ideas

A nutty French refreshment from LA’s Victoria’s Kitchen

A longstanding French tradition, almond water has been produced in small batches by nut lovers around the globe for hundreds of years. Bringing this all-natural treat to the masses is Victoria’s Kitchen, a small, family-run company started by husband-and-wife duo David and Deborah Meniane to “honor the importance of family and traditions that are passed on from generation to generation.”

Loaded with the nutrients found naturally in almonds, the gluten-free beverage still uses Grandma Victoria’s original recipe of water, natural almond flavor, pure cane sugar—and, say the founders, her love—for sweetening. Although some may be put off by the added sugar, we can assure you the mild taste is just right.

Victoria’s Kitchen is available in select stores across California, Texas and Florida, as well as online where a case of 12 16oz bottles sells for $27.

Designer Noé Duchaufour Lawrance has fitted out an alpine ski lodge in the French Alps with a trunk-like hearth, curved fir walls and a floating bed.

The chunky fireplace is anchored to the centre of a family living room, located beneath the sloping timber eaves on the three-storey Chalet Béranger’s top floor.

Desks, chairs and other objects by Duchaufour Lawrance are placed around each room alongside other designer furniture pieces.

Wall and floors of both fir and Vals stone surround a Jacuzzi on the first floor, while concrete floors can be found in rooms elsewhere.

We’ve also recently featured designs for a lodge with a sloping roof you can ski over – take a look here.

See also: our story about a Paris gallery with a white Corian interior that Duchaufour Lawrance designed in 2010.

Photography is by Vincent Leroux.

Here’s some more text from Noé Duchaufour Lawrance:

Chalet Béranger

Far from the geometric construction methods of a traditional chalet, the interior architecture of this family home is a domestic landscape whose forms emerge from the ground like small functional mountains rising from a valley.

Resolutely fluid and modern, the result is a set of lines and organic forms composed around a wooden ribbon.

A large, main room is set above the whole construction, defining the central point of the chalet where the family comes together around a warm hearth.

St Martin de Belleville (French Alps)- 2011

A windowless yellow facade shrouds the interior of this concrete gymnasium in southern France by architects Heams et Michel.

Located beside a secondary school in the town of Tourrette Levens, the building is used by students for gymnastics and as a general hall.

The textured concrete exterior is separated into rows of vertical stripes that the architects hoped would resemble the folding fabric of a stage curtain.

Daylight permeates the concrete walls through high-level windows on the rear elevation, as well as through a pyramidal roof light.

A colourful rock-climbing wall is located at the back of the hall, while panels of oriented strand board line the lower levels of the three remaining walls.

We’ve recently featured another building in France with a rock-climbing wall inside – see our earlier story here.

Photography is by Serge Demailly and Heams et Michel

Here’s some text from architect Benjamin Michel:

Gymnastics building

The building of the gym in Tourrette Levens is part of a plot where is erected a secondary school, and a gymnasium. This new building reserved for students and associations is intended for gymnastics and circus.

The program simplicity led us to reflect on the plastic side of the project. In fact, the area of study of the circus, put out the physical and moral development, includes a cultural, artistic, and social. The transience of the circus that is assembled and disassembled in cities remains in the collective unconscious. Our project is an allegory of the circus tent.

The idea is simple ” a concrete box that was covered with a cloth “. Concealment becomes mystery, and make us perceive differently what was commonplace before. We wanted to create a sculptural object concealed and packed in a skin of concrete, corrugated as a wavy stage curtain.

The yellow ocher color gives the blind walls an expression of lightness heightened by the fact that the stamped concrete does not touch the ground. Because of this, the object, which could have been a simple gym, takes an artistic dimension.

The volume chosen is voluntary simple : a rectangular parallelepiped of 14 meters wide and 8 meters in height in continuity of the existing gymnasium and detached from it by the volume of the entrance hall and deposits, which is less high.

By its presence, the project aims to complete the overall design of the existing sports facilities, by standing as a new south gable.

A single material wraps all the facades of the object. It walls are made of a stamped and painted concrete called “draped concrete” with a texture reminiscent of stage curtains.

The texture of the drapery is obtained by using two alternating matrices of slightly different patterns, but the same height as the concrete shells, specially designed for the project. Those walls have been casted all the way up, and the self-placing concrete has been poured in a single process so as not to reveal a horizontal joint. The vertical ones disappear in the pattern of the drapery.

Inside the room, a natural light is achieved by the presence of two major openings, not noticeable from the outside, a glass square on the roof, centered on the room, and a horizontal window in the north facade.

In this volume, the human scale is found by the calpinage at the bottom (2m50), a bounding of impact resistant OSB panels. And at the top we used acoustic wood wool insulation panels. The ceiling is made of raw concrete.

A direct connection to the existing gymnasium was constructed to promote exchanges between the various sports.

By this project, the idea of a building disappears in favor of an object carved in relation to its context and program. The rationale for the staging of such an object lies in the definition of the close relationship between sports, circus, entertainment, art, and social.

Project name: Gymnastics building Programme : Sport.
Location: Tourrette Levens, France

Architects: Heams et Michel
Engineer: GL Ingénierie
Client: Conseil Général des Alpes Maritimes

Project area: 240 m2 SHON.
Project year: 2011.

Entreprises:
Dévoiement réseaux: La Nouvelle SIROLAISE
Gros Œuvre: TRIMARCO Construction
Etanchéité: GALINELLI
Menuiseries métalliques – Serrurerie: SARL DEGIVRY
Sols Sportifs: MS DECO
É quipements sportifs: ENTRE PRISES
Electricité: EUROPELEC
Plomberie – Chauffage – Ventilation: AQUALIA
Finitions: SILENCE CONORT

The pitched roof atop this Paris house won’t keep out the rain – it’s actually a pergola for growing fruit over a roof terrace.

French architects Djuric Tardio designed the two-storey house, which is constructed entirely from Finnish larch.

As well as the terrace on the roof, there is also a decked dining area at ground level and a projecting first-floor balcony.

Mobile kitchen furniture can be wheeled outdoors on sunny days, while in winter the house is warmed by a fireplace just inside.

Walls inside the house slide open so that rooms can flexibly accommodate different day-to-day activities.

The whole house is raised on a plinth above the ground to prevent flooding.

If you’re a fan of timber houses, check out one out in the woods in Sweden and another perched on rocky terrain in Australia.

Photography is by Clément Guillaume.

Here’s some more text from Djuric Tardio Architectes:

Eco-Sustainable House
Antony, Paris, France

The new project has been realised in a neighbourhood, Antony, that is an example of the belief that architecture, whether heterogeneous and homogeneous, is shaped by outdated zoning regulations. The delays in securing permits, along with conditions of the urban situation and our desire to continue and refine our own research on wood constructions, led us to propose a type of construction system. This type is still not released in urban areas and rather reserved for detached houses in less dense sites. The urban rules and the site context, which is very typical, have suggested the template, which has proved a real asset to the project.

Up there, the shape of the roof/pergola, which looks like an unfinished roof, has a specific function. On the one hand, it takes the archetype of the context, inserting the project in its environment without disrupting the urban rhythm, on the other hand, it won’t accommodate a closed roof that would become a catch-all attic or a wasted space.

So we have inserted inhabitants in it, and have left it open by transforming it into a vegetable terrace, intimate and sunny. The choice of plants proposed by the landscape designer, grasses and vines on the pergola offering fruits (kiwis, squashes, grapes), will enable the owners to enjoy a vegetable garden, a suspended garden.

The program was for a blended family, calling for a flexible, modular design and design process. The answer was to instill two areas, separated but and overlapping. With very few adjustments, these two areas could become one larger, combined space.

The walls of the skylight illuminating the ground floor can be optionally removed, tomorrow perhaps working as railings and returning visual link between the two floors. The staircase is positioned in the central frame of servant areas, with the entry today common to both access. Tomorrow it might be possible to open this frame in onto the day spaces.

Giant sliding walls on each floor divide into two day spaces in order to currently organize a new partition of the areas and create an office/library on the ground floor area and a cinema on the first floor, and tomorrow, to partition the space according to use. A sideboard on wheels slips between the kitchen and the terrace on the ground floor, moving the dining area outside on sunny days.

The layout has been designed to focus on flexibility and adaptation of the everyday living spaces, seasons (in summer, the space continues outside and is more open and more spacious, while in winter, it is gathered around the fireplace) and on long-term projects. This layout researches the adaption of the lifestyle of the owners.

Eco-Sustainable Construction System

Completely built in wood panels placed on a pedestal (the ground here is very bad), the house is completely prefabricated in a workshop and delivered to the site to be finally assembled in just two weeks. This is a building system in Finnish wood panels that come from sustainably managed cooperatives of small private forest owners.

The pre-cut panels, supplemented by wood fiber insulation and non-treated siding, arrived at the site almost finished, reducing pollution to a minimum (the site being located in a dense suburb).

The façades, in wood panels too, were mounted along the floor. With a very efficient exterior insulation system which completely allows the elimination of thermal bridges, wood construction has the advantage to make the building very powerful. The under-floor gas-fired heating with low temperature becomes almost superfluous.

The double-glazed + argon windows of the patios and the South façades, deliberately oversized, capture the sun in winter and are sheltered by a canopy and a pergola in summer. This allows together with their performance and surface, an easy control of the solar gain and air flow as needed, without necessitating an intensive use of air conditioning or heating.

The main facade on the street, lodging the rooms in the North, is a composition of large glazed openings and single opening shutters designed in stainless steel mirror with no glazing. The reflections of the vegetation and the movement of these shutters in stainless steel mirrors make the façade changing. The ventilation of the rooms is regulated by the openings of the shutters, and the penetration of light through the windows.

The recovery of rainwater can water the garden and planters allow homeowners to cultivate aromatic plants and garden without water over-consumption.

Paris architects Béal & Blanckaert have completed a Corten-clad library in the grounds of a monastery in northern France (photography by Julien Lanoo).

The weathered steel panels cover both the faceted exterior walls and roof of the single-storey Médiathèque Corbie.

The building has a cross-shaped plan with a reception desk at its centre and an entrance on the west side.

A children’s library, an adult section, an activities room and a storage area are located inside the four wings, which all feature white walls and white furniture.

Bright purple chairs are positioned behind the library’s glass-fronted south facade and face the town of Corbie beyond.

Antoine Béal and Ludovic Blanckaert also recently completed a colourfully-striped nursery in Paris – read about it here.

Here’s some more text from the architects:

Médiathèque de Corbie

The Corbie media library is built in the enclosure of the Corbie monastery built a few miles away from Amiens and its Cathedral. It incorporates one of the monastery’s fabulous eighteenth century stone walls in its design. Built on the edge of a strong hill, the media library overlooks Corbie and its classified gothic historic architecture and monuments. The Project includes itself in the enclosure as a building, a sculpture, and an object that captures the surrounding landscape and crystalizes it. However it is also a cultural container that closely examines the qualities of this particular and sensible site.

The media library is open to the diverse landscape; to the south, a large window and an open terrace display the city of Corbie, whilst to the west and the north, the project marries itself with the monasterie’s gardens, placing specific attention the the trees and vegetal surfaces. The media library is also closed on itself, preserving some areas of intimacy.

The building finds its form from the search for a certain functional rationality within an expressive framework. It is the result of an intelligent combination of a simple and stable form: a star, or rather a four branch cross, and facades and roofings of various inclinations.

From this cross-shaped plan, the building’s functions are formed by hard geometric walls and rigorous facets exteriorly covered by panels of Cor-ten steel. This material assures the link between architecture and sculpture.

On the interior, however, a neutral white covering reflects an abstract unity, a clarity of usage, and compliments the value of both the interior gardens and the large panoramic view of the city of Corbie and its architectural history.

Name of the project: Médiathèque Corbie Adress : L’enclos – Corbie – France
Architectes: Antoine Béal et Ludovic Blanckaert Collaborateurs : E.Veauvy – C.Jossien
Client: Ville de Corbie