‘Les Lodges’ is a project conceived by AW² for Bouygues Immobilier in Chanteloup-en-Brie (Seine-et-Marne).
It was the recipient of the 2015 Pyramide d’Argent award in the category of the Innovation Award by the Fédération des promoteurs immobiliers (FPI) of the Ile-de-France region, in the presence of the two presidents of the jury, Patrick Devedjian, President of the General Council of Hauts-de-Seine, and the architect Michel Macary. The Local Planning and Development Authority for Marne-la-vallée, Epamarne, the municipality of Chanteloup-en-Brie (Seine-et-Marne) and Bouygues Immobilier have mobilized in favor of sustainable construction and innovative design of the city and its lodgings. With the aim to contribute very concretely to the evolution of construction practices and research in this area, they decided to embark on a trial building program.
The Lodges are a response to a major challenge: to achieve sustainable homes, created with energy performance in mind, that are able to integrate seamlessly into the landscape of the town and be of their time, whilst also able to project themselves into the future. The originality of the project is the architectural design of the houses which allows them to be scalable. The houses can be enlarged with the addition of wooden prefabricated modules: a house with 3 rooms and can expand to 4, 5 or 6 rooms. These houses have been marketed with the possibility for each buyer to retain the option of 3, 4, 5 or 6 rooms. All homes can theoretically become 6 rooms without changing the land surface. It takes three to four months of work to create additional rooms on the house.
Scalability is above all a way to settle perennially in a town, a neighborhood, a place that appropriates. It responds to not only the growth of a family, but also the modification of a family, sometimes blended. Beyond the interest that an evolutionary home may present to buyers, it’s about creating density in an operation of individual houses. Indeed, as opposed to townhouses that are more fuel efficient in terms of land use, individual houses generate low-density urban areas. Anticipating the possibility of increasing the density without modifying the tax base is a possible answer to the question of the mineralisation of the land. Finally, scalability allows municipalities to better anticipate future needs for public facilities, and perpetuates a population under very favorable conditions.
The air heating system participates in the simplicity of scalable housing; if the owner wishes to enlarge his house, he can do so without having to add an additional heating circuit in the ventilation system which will still provide heat to the added part. To limit the environmental impact concerning the choice of materials, the house was designed using bio-source materials such as hemp wool as insulation in the timber frame and cover. The exterior woodwork and wood cladding (Douglas) are solid wood treated with a non-film glaze, and sport a European Ecolabel, which vouches for the sustainability of the facades. The houses created are passive, that is to say, they were designed to be able to respond passively to their needs: natural light, warm in winter, cool in summer. The operation endeavours to obtain the ‘Passive Building / Passivhaus’ energy performance label. Today, this label represents the highest level of economically feasible energy efficiency in Europe. The winners of the Pyramides d’Argent will be candidates before the national jury of the Pyramides d’Or, to be awarded June 24, 2015, in Bordeaux, at the 45th Congress of the FPI de France.
