Dominique Coulon & Associés has converted a manor house in the French town of Pélissanne into a library with a glass-fronted extension that looks onto a leafy public park.
Located in the heart of the formerly fortified town in Provence, the Piero Bottero Media Library is named for a French fiction writer who spent most of his life in the region.
Dominique Coulon's Strasbourg-based studio designed the library and media centre to occupy one of the town's many historic buildings, the Maison Maureau, which connects with the adjacent public park.
Top: The Piero Bottero Media Library by Dominique Coulon & Associés. Above: the project involved converting a french-manor
"The positioning of the media library respects the integrity of the park and the house," the studio explained. "It sets up a dialogue between two eras, two dimensions, by opposing the verticality of the volume of the house with the horizontality of the extension."
The library looks onto a leafy courtyard
The 17th-century house was carefully preserved and adapted to fulfil its new function. The sequence of existing rooms is retained along with the connection through the building from the street on one side to the park on the other.
A double-height events space occupies an existing ground-floor room in the western part of the building, while the reception rooms in the eastern part have been restored and repurposed as meeting or reading rooms.
Glazed walls connect the interior spaces wit...