“This project is part of a story of trust woven over time,” Sandrine Sarah Faivre says of Villa Rossignols, her fourth collaboration with the same owner, following two Parisian apartments and a holiday home in Corsica. In Marseille, he entrusted her with transforming a former caretaker’s house into a family home, built on a permit drawn up by Loïc Jourdan of the Jobe Agency, with project management carried out by architect Caroline Milliet of Atelier Vue Mer.
The house is a pied-à-terre, a weekend refuge for a family of four, and one charged with memory: the owner grew up next door, where part of his family still lives. “The project was built around two obvious facts,” Sandrine explains, “the striking view of the Mediterranean, and the gorgeous presence of two hundred-year-old pines that we wanted to preserve at all costs, even during the most complex phases of the structural work.” Faced with what she calls this “sovereign nature,” she approached the project “with a spirit of purity, light and softness.”
That restraint shows in the materials. Sorted pine parquet runs throughout, echoing the trees outside, while a fine beige stone, sober and bright, dresses the terrace floor and bathrooms in a quiet play of textures. The greatest challenge, she notes, was the terrace level itself: “a large rectangle leaning against the rock, with a very low ceiling height, but open in large bay windows on the horizon.” She organized the space in three sequences, a kitchen-dining room, a fireside living room, and a reading area built around a custom oak radassière, threaded together by mirrors that extend the traverse, with large curtains taming the southern light.
The furnishings draw deeply on Marseille’s creative scene, layered with pieces of real provenance. In the entrance, a Padouk veneer arrangement in raffia canework, handwoven by an artisan straw maker, sits beside a Ponza rug from Atelier Tortil for The Invisible Collection, an artwork by Arsène Welkin at Double V Gallery, a Charlotte Perriand stool in Cassina reissue, and a vase by Mana Objects. On the original staircase, a 1950s Charlotte Perriand Bauche armchair, terracotta tables by Houda x Memòri, and vases from Poterie Ravel.
The kitchen pairs a raku credenza by Fabienne L’Hostis with made-to-measure mirrors and a wall lamp by Frédéric Bourdiec of Architecture Céramique, a Provençal family table set with Pierre Chapo stools and chairs, and Oros Design‘s twisted wooden egg cups and spoons. The living room holds a custom oak bookcase drawn by Sandrine herself, an Atelier Carlès & Demarquet table and armchair set in bleached green plane wood, an artwork by Manoela Medeiros at Double V Gallery, ceramics from Atelier Jouve in Aix-en-Provence, and a pair of rope armchairs by John Himmel via Annie Paté.
Upstairs, a Le Corbusier wall lamp in its Nemo Lighting re-edition recurs through the bedrooms, alongside more Pierre Chapo and Charlotte Perriand pieces, a table by Guillaume Grando at Diego Escobar Gallery, and a patchwork quilt by Sarah Espeute’s Oeuvres Sensibles. On the terrace, a ceramic backgammon set by Maximilien Pellet at Double V Gallery waits beside Atelier Jouve’s metal and ceramic tables.
It is the terrace, finally, that Sandrine calls her favourite space in the house. “This breathtaking terrace, this tireless view,” she says. “The house exudes a rare, almost palpable form of timelessness. A place that feels good, suspended between sky and sea.”
