Chai de la Borderie House is a traditional stone residence located in Salles-sur-Mer, France, redesigned in 2021 by Office Zola.

Description
For this restoration project of an old cellar into a living space and workshop, it is proposed to articulate the two parts of the building, one inhabited and the other in the making via an extension slipped between the rubble walls and invisible since the street. This is inserted between the existing house and the rehabilitated outbuilding. It opens the living space onto the garden and generates a patio while connecting the buildings to form a single one. The workshop, set up in the double height of the cellar, faces north to benefit from suitable light.
To balance the difference in level between the buildings, the ground is lowered to provide a generous single-storey space fully accessible to a person in a wheelchair, an exterior ramp providing access to the garden and then to the street. The disbursement made for the entire project required reworking of the existing structures, thus making it possible to take over the costs of the new structures to be carried out. Two concrete slabs form the link between the buildings. This post-free space thus frees the facades fully open to the outside.
The extension is intentionally discreet and sober to reveal the qualities of the existing building and amplify the relationship with the outside by contrast with the more massive and more opaque preserved and rehabilitated buildings...