The Hôtel Les Roches | PietriArchitectes

The Hôtel Les Roches Le Lavandou, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Invisible at first glance, the complexity of the Hôtel Les Roches project, recently completed by PietriArchitectes, resides in its capacity to settle naturally into the landscape. Each volume, every line, and each of the materials was carefully considered to give the feeling that this ensemble has always belonged to its slope, to the rock, and to the sea. And yet, it is a technically challenging total reconstruction designed with precision and restraint. The technical mastery implemented in the project fades away behind the obviousness of the place. HISTORY OF AN EXCEPTIONAL MEDITERRANEAN HOLIDAYDESTINATION The site of the Hôtel Les Roches is intimately linked with Le Lavandou’s history as a holiday resort and to the gilded legend of the French Riviera. Between sea and sky, this emblematic establishment was developed in the 1930s, at a time when the Mediterranean as a holiday destination was experiencing an unprecedented boom. Imagined from the beginning as an exceptional place, it attracted a discreet, demanding, and loyal clientele, seeking authenticity, calm, and breathtaking views. Over the decades, the hotel evolved. In the 1950s, it underwent an initial enlargement, then a more ambitious extension in the 1980s. These different architectural layers came to comprise a patchwork, each attesting to a period, a taste, and a way of inhabiting the shoreline. The hotel built its identity on this juxtaposition, blending white render, blue shutters, split volumes, and especially, a powerful presence of local stone from Bormes.

HOSPITALITY EXCELLENCE AND ARCHITECTURALE EXIGENCE

With the passage of time, the site’s standards of comfort and contemporary requirements gradually slipped. Neglected, disjointed, losing coherence, the hotel had lost its lustre, nevertheless retaining a particular aura linked to its exceptional location. In 2009, it was acquired by a French, family-owned hotel group, convinced of its unique potential. The project did not involve erasing the past, but rather offering the hotel a new interpretation, commensurate with the genius loci. It went beyond a simple restoration to become a genuine renaissance, carried forward by the will to reconcile the memory of the place with hotelier excellence and architectural exigence. Nestled in the calanques of Peire Gouerbe, the project relies upon the natural slope of the terrain to organise its various layers. A stone platform serves as the base of the building and houses the first guestrooms directly facing the shore. Higher up, an intermediate level with a slight setback manages a gentle transition towards three main buildings. The whole project settles into the steep terrain like a series of tiers, limiting the visual impact from the coastline and creating a new rapport between the architecture, the site, and the landscape.

REBUILDING UPON TWO WORLDS

From the beginning, everything stems from a place, an exceptional site, encased in a little bay of Le Lavandou, facing the Mediterranean, amidst a landscape moulded by rock, the slope, and hardy vegetation. There stood a mythical hotel, marked by the history of a 20th-century seaside resort, but one transformed over the decades by successive additions. During the first visit, the building was damaged, split up, and technically obsolete. However, it still carried within a rare architectural memory, namely through a vaulted, almost troglodyte stone structure, that descended all the way down to the sea. This base – between cottage, grotto and shelter – was the starting point for the project. The question at the outset was how could a contemporary hotel be built that would become an integral part of this memory, in this material? The answer results from a double reading of the site, i.e., to rebuild based upon two superimposed worlds: the massive, protective, lower world of stone, and the fragmented, luminous, and airy upper world. The base, hollowed out of the slope and clad in Bormes stone, houses the guestrooms closest to the sea. Designed as stone grottoes or boat sheds, these rooms are vaulted and open to the horizon with picture windows. They provide the unique experience of sleeping in an almost archaic space that is thick and rough and in a direct relation with the water. This base also ensures stability facing natural elements, thereby forming a solid base upon which a platform rests – the lively level of the hotel – with reception, the restaurant, the pool, and the common areas. This horizontal line, which breaks with the slopes, acts as a fault line between two universes. Above, the buildings rise without ever imposing. Fragmented into four independent volumes, separated by gaps, this allows the relief to breathe. These planted interstitial spaces receive the stone stairways planted with Mediterranean species. Vegetation plays an active role here in filtering views, reintroducing nature between the built masses, and accompanies the descent towards the sea. These voids are imagined as landscape respirations, allowing large trees and light to pass through the constructions. Green roofs and planted terraces strengthen this continuity, even bringing the geography of the site directly onto the buildings. The architecture of the upper level is designed to be lighter with ultra-high-performance fibre-reinforced balconies and sun shading overhangs, the latter with their rounded perforated motifs that soften light. These fine, almost floating elements are a contemporary reading of the relation with the sun, the facade, and intimacy. They underscore the will to inhabit the Mediterranean with restraint and precision.

PROWESS COHERENT WITH ITS ENVIRONMENT

Our first architectural intention was to restore a coherent unity to this disjointed site owing to the successive strata of time, whilst affirming a great lightness of perception. But this apparent lightness rests upon genuine technical prowess. The challenge was not simply to design a hotel, but to integrate it into a complex, steeply sloping terrain, constrained by its built and natural environment, and exposed to the sea. Each building has been designed as an independent element, embedded with precision into the topography, following a sophisticated logic of assembly that eludes any sense of artificiality. Mediterranean architecture guided our approach. Not as a fossilised style, but as a culture of construction, made of thick walls, controlled openings, durable materials, and drop shadows. The technical answer for these formal choices required precise engineering work to adapt the structure to variations of the ground, performing envelopes, and materials chosen for their mechanical as much as aesthetic qualities. The fragmentation of volumes, far from being an effect, is a strategy of integration, away of inhabiting the relief without dominating it, of sculpting the masses rather than imposing them. The project increased the number of views framing the landscape, articulates them, and organizes the corridors and walkways through a system of footbridges, platforms, and stairways that are all part of the composition. Vegetation has been reintroduced as an architectural material, enveloping the structures, filtering perspectives, and extending the built part into the natural environment. Each constraint became an opportunity to design a solution.

TECHNICAL DETAILS 

This project draws its power from its architectural precision and exacting construction methods. Imagined as a work of light and matter, it relies on a clear and rigorous architectural style, in which each element plays a structural, aesthetic, and symbolic role. The locally quarried Bormes stone is everywhere. It forms the gable walls that envelope the stone base and are the project’s foundation. It maintains the link with the ground and the geology of the site, and places the hotel in a powerful, almost earthy continuity with the landscape. Raw stone, cut and assembled with care, imbues the composition with a reserved gravitas, a thickness of time. By contrast, the ultra-high-performance fibre-reinforced concrete (UHPC) has been used in the slab overhangs, genuine and light caps extending into the void. Sculpted with precision, these technical elements – finer at the edges, and perforated with rounded motifs – filter summer light and generate a vibration of shadow and transparency on the facades. They convey a contemporary approach to ornament, where structural performance serves architectural expression. This dialogue between the massive presence of stone and the project’s technical lightness exerts its influence throughout the project. Built volumes nestle in the slope, without imposing. Walkways and corridors are organised with metal footbridges, and stone and steel staircases integrated into the landscape openings. Each detail, each assemblage, attests to an intention to create architecture in the most exact meaning of the term. A project where the material constructs the space, and where technique becomes a form of poetry.

| Project | Complete reconstruction of a 40-room five-star hotel

| Adress | 1 Avenue des trois Dauphins 83980 LE LAVANDOU

| Client | Private

| Architect | PietriArchitectes

| Project management | Agence Rolland JJ, Atelier 54, Phase 3, NJN

| Structural Engineering | STE IC 42

| Fluid Engineering | GBI

| Green spaces | Derbez Paysage

| Images | Nicolas Anetson