A weekend in the Lubéron

We finished Solène Atelier in spring of 2025. The building is a small guest residence on a working olive estate in the Lubéron, designed to host visitors during the autumn harvest. We visited it again in May of this year, ten months after handover and a full harvest season later.

It is the first project of ours in Provence. I want to write down some of what we got right and some of what we did not.

What the building taught us

A few things only became clear once people had lived in the building.

Architecture is a slow conversation. The first answer is rarely the right one.

The covered loggia running along the south facade — which we had imagined as a connecting circulation space — turned out to be where guests spent most of their waking hours. We had specified two slim oak benches along it, expecting them to be used occasionally. Camille and her family have since added six more, scavenged from the estate. The loggia has become the heart of the building.

The five guest suites we designed are now, by general agreement, slightly too small. Not by much — perhaps a meter in length. We had been working to a tight per-suite cost target during design, and the trim helped. In hindsight, we should have pushed back harder. The rooms work, but they do not breathe the way they could.

What we are taking with us

The local limestone block we used for the exterior has weathered beautifully in a single year — softer, warmer, slightly less uniform. We will use it again on a project in the south of France that begins next year. Some choices reward you over time. This is one of them.

A small note on travel: we spent four days on site during the May visit. Two of them were the most useful days I have had in a while. There is no substitute for sitting in a finished room with the people who use it.