France has a range of architects working in the quiet, material-first, close-to-nature style we look for at Slow Casa. Houses built from stone, wood and concrete, shaped by the landscape.
This is a working list, not a finished one. We'll keep adding to it as we find more.
Wunder
Wunder is run by the married couple Elodie Dumas and Augustin Decaux, with a team of about twenty-five in Rennes. They mostly build hotels, restaurants and cafés across Brittany, but their most personal work is their own family house, Maison Roz, above the Aven river in Finistère, in the Decaux family for five generations and rebuilt as a full renovation.
The Refreshment Club
Led by the architect Onur Keçe and Alix Petit, founder of the fashion label Heimstone, The Refreshment Club works across architecture, interiors, furniture and landscape. Their own house, Casa Keçe, a nineteenth-century barn and farmhouse in the Vexin forest an hour from Paris, is in our directory and has been published in Dwell, Elle Decoration and Marie Claire Maison.
Atelier du Pont
Founded in 1997 by Anne-Cécile Comar and Philippe Croisier, Atelier du Pont is a larger studio, around forty-five people, working across housing, public buildings and hospitality, alongside a parallel line of smaller, more personal projects in the French countryside. Robust, simple volumes with warm interiors and a strong sense of place. On Slow Casa via their work with ARU Arquitectura on Estancia San José, a restored stone farmstead on Menorca.
Amelia Tavella
Amelia Tavella is a French architect of Corsican heritage, based in Aix-en-Provence, whose work is closely tied to the Mediterranean landscape, memory and material. She's known for grafting contemporary interventions onto old structures with unusual delicacy, letting ruin and new construction hold equal weight. On Slow Casa via Casa Santa Teresa, in Ajaccio, Corsica.
Margaux Fritz
Margaux Fritz is a Marseille-born architect who trained in Paris, spent time in Los Angeles and New York, and has worked independently in Marseille since 2017 on private houses and boutique projects. Her style leans mid-century Californian, clean lines, big glass, a strong pull between indoors and out, which she gets to indulge fully in Marseille's light. She's designed her own house, Villa Bambi, a limewashed, geometric build on a tricky plot, and worked with Audrey Colombani of Maisons Dominos on several of their rental homes, including Domino Trois in Marseille and the Alpine chalet Domino Quatre in Saint-Gervais-les-Bains.
Studio Razavi
Led by the architect Alireza Razavi, Studio Razavi is best known in this context for Mountain House, a 2017 house in Manigod in the French Alps, built under strict local rules that usually produce pastiche chalets. Razavi studied the old vernacular, animals on the ground floor, fodder above, living quarters on top, and reworked it in concrete and timber.
BAST
BAST, short for Bureau Architectures Sans Titre, is a Toulouse studio founded in 2013, working mostly on houses and refurbishments in the southwest. Their rural houses, like a home built into a sloping forest site above a stream near Castanet-Tolosan, show the same instinct for working with a difficult site rather than flattening it.
Looking for a beautiful place to stay? Browse our design-led homes to rent across Europe in the Slow Casa directory.