Noue Studio rebuilds a 1983 single-storey villa around one simple reversal: swapping the kitchen and the bedroom to rewrite how light, privacy, and daily use move through the house. The practice treats the existing structure as the starting point rather than a constraint, favoring precise recalibration over demolition. What emerges is a home where circulation, not added square footage, does the real design work.
The swap itself is the quiet engine of the whole project. By exchanging the positions of kitchen and bedroom, Noue Studio clarifies the spatial organization of the original 1983 building without touching its footprint, and the change ripples outward from the entrance, where a single opening now guides the eye and gradually reveals a perspective across the full sequence of living spaces.
Opening onto the living room, the relocated kitchen becomes a shared space rather than a service room, encouraging the kind of daily interaction that a closed kitchen forecloses. It’s a familiar move in contemporary villa renovation projects, but here it’s tied directly to the swap logic rather than applied as a generic open-plan gesture.
Enlarged openings in the living room push the relationship between interior and landscape further, turning light and the surrounding garden into active components of the plan rather than a backdrop. The continuity between interior and exterior is reinforced structurally, not just visually, through the scale of the new glazing.
The bathroom, by contrast, works on the opposite register. Its layout is conceived as a gradient of privacy, adapted to a variety of uses and rhythms — a deliberate counterpoint to the openness staged in the living areas, and a reminder that the project’s real subject is the sequencing of degrees of exposure through the house.
Material choices stay close to the building’s own history. The palette relies on natural, long-lasting materials, and the existing wooden ceilings are preserved and repainted rather than replaced, engaging in dialogue with new solid ash and oak joinery that marks out each intervention within the house.
Lime plaster walls carry that same restraint into the vertical surfaces, finishing the rooms without competing with the ceiling or the joinery. Against this neutral backdrop, the rammed earth fireplace regains a central, structuring role within the living space — redesigned in rammed earth brick, it reads as the one element allowed to be genuinely assertive.
Noue Studio’s own archive makes the intent legible: the practice’s modernist apartment renovation in Fribourg worked from a comparable premise, letting an existing structure dictate the terms of its own transformation rather than overwriting it. This single-storey villa applies the same discipline to a very different building type — one-storey, suburban, domestic in scale rather than urban.
One swapped room carries the weight of the entire project. Swapping kitchen and bedroom is a modest move on paper, but it’s the decision that makes every subsequent choice legible — without it, the enlarged openings, the gradient bathroom, and the rammed earth fireplace would read as unrelated gestures rather than a single, coherent reorganization of the house.
Renovation of a Single-Storey Villa by Noue Studio | Location: — Year: 2025 — Key materials: existing wood ceilings (preserved), solid ash and oak joinery, lime plaster, rammed earth brick