Les Brumes

The Baronnies Provençales sit between the Drôme and the Hautes-Alpes, a regional park of limestone ridges, lavender, olive terraces and apricot orchards, quieter and less visited than the Provence further south. Montaulieu is a small medieval village near Nyons, olive country, and the house sits on the terraced slope above it looking back down. It's an area known for its lime blossom and its olives, for climbing around Buis-les-Baronnies, and for some of the darkest night skies in France. Mont Ventoux is not far. There's no bus, so a car is part of the deal.

Clément Salvaire helped found Lumipod, a family company that makes a modular building system, and in the first lockdown of 2020 he went looking for somewhere to put one for his own family. What he wanted was minimal, comfortable and genuinely in the landscape rather than beside it, which is what the form does: a circle wrapped entirely in curved glass, so there's no back of the house and no front, just the valley turning around you. Inside it stays simple, and the glass does the decorating. It was a private retreat before it was a rental, which is usually a good sign. Nothing about it is trying to look rustic, and it's better for that, it reads as a piece of equipment set carefully on an old agricultural terrace.