In the hills above Neuchâtel, Noue Studio reworks a 1983 family villa in Montézillon—swapping rooms, enlarging openings, and letting the Swiss landscape become an active participant in daily life.
The project begins with the existing structure as its starting point, proposing a measured and respectful interior intervention rather than an overhaul. The most decisive move is a simple swap: the kitchen and bedroom change places, a reconfiguration that untangles the spatial organization and improves the fluidity of everyday use. From the entrance, an opening guides the eye and gradually reveals a perspective of the volumes within the living space, establishing a visual continuity that the original layout never offered.
Open to the living room, the kitchen now contributes to the formation of a shared space that extends toward the exterior. The enlargement of the living room openings reinforces this sense of spatial continuity, making light and landscape active components of the interior. The Jura foothills, the shifting fog, the bare winter trees—these elements are no longer observed through narrow frames but absorbed into the rhythm of inhabitation.
The material palette grounds the intervention in natural and durable choices. Existing wooden ceilings are preserved and repainted, engaging in dialogue with solid ash and oak joinery that highlight the new interventions within the house. Walls are finished with lime plaster, their surfaces quietly warm and breathing. The fireplace, redesigned in raw earth brick, regains a structuring role at the heart of the living space—an anchor around which the open plan organizes itself without imposed formality.
The layout of the bathroom follows a gradation of intimacy, adapted to the diversity of uses and temporalities that a family home demands. Each intervention seeks to reveal the quality of the existing volumes and to reinforce the identity of the place. This is renovation as a form of listening—understanding what a house already knows and helping it speak more clearly.
