Dezeen Magazine

Maison by Services Généraux

Maison is a fictional French home dressed with design-focused furnishings

Multidisciplinary design studio Services Généraux has created a series of renderings that reimagine the interiors of a dilapidated home in the French countryside.

The project – which is aptly named Maison, after the French term for "house" – is the first time that Services Généraux has created a purely conceptual project.

Until now the Paris-based studio has largely created installations, imagery and video content for notable fashion labels such as Nike and Louis Vuitton.

Maison by Services Généraux

"It turns out – as no surprise – that designing and decorating a full residential house for yourself is an outstandingly personal work to achieve," said the studio's founders, Antoine and Valentin, who avoid revealing their surnames or faces.

"It's not about spaces and objects at that point, it's about moods, atmospheres, lifestyle and intimate choices about daily life," they told Dezeen.

"We often hear that we are an overly discreet and disembodied studio; well now we went all in."

Maison by Services Généraux

The idea for Maison arose after the pair took a trip to Correze, a district in the south-west of France, and stumbled across the time-worn ruins of a farmhouse.

Nestled amongst a hundred-hectare estate that's blanketed with trees, the structure had just a couple of crumbling gabled walls left intact.

One of them now forms part of the facade of the imagined home. The rest of the exterior is crafted from uneven layers of light-hued concrete that the studio hopes highlight the irregularities of the existing stone-walls.

Expansive windows are punctuated in the south-facing facade to provide uninterrupted views of the landscape.

Maison by Services Généraux

"It is often nicer to work with imposed constraints, such as existing stone, a tricky topography, or something else," the studio explained.

"But in our case it was much more of a conscious decision – we wanted to anchor the house in a cultural heritage, in a geographical patrimony, being the southwestern French countryside," they continued.

"To achieve that we wanted to respect the ruins of the very old stone barn, and use it as a cornerstone for the new construction."

Maison by Services Généraux

Inside the imagines interior, living spaces are dressed with an array of furnishings from prominent designers like Max Lamb, Neri&Hu and Philippe Malouin.

Together the pieces are meant to appear "comfortable, sensitive and warm", instead of like objects displayed in a museum.

"Our desire to do a total work has pushed us to dedicate as much effort and consideration to the choice of pieces, works and furniture that inhabit the interiors as the design of the house itself," added the studio.

Maison by Services Généraux

In the study-cum-living area, a long, plank-like timber desk is accompanied by a simple black-framed seat. A huge mottled rug then runs up to the other end of the room, where one of Faye Toogood's Roly-Poly chairs has been placed beside the window.

A roughly-hewn stone bathtub sits at the centre of the bathroom, with a sink basin to match.

The kitchen is similarly anchored by a stone breakfast island, with a hole-punctured cork chair from the Campana brothers' Sobreiro Collection placed nearby.

Maison by Services Généraux

One bedroom simply features a mattress pushed up against the wall and a crinkled silver lighting fixture mounted on the wall. The master bedroom then boasts a floor-to-ceiling dark-wood headboard, and huge canvas covered in loose red and white paint strokes.

Maison by Services Généraux

It also includes a fireplace where the studio pictures the imaginary inhabitant burning blocks of wood chopped from trees in the surrounding forests.

"Drawing a house is never a trivial exercise. We do not just draw shapes or vision, but life scenarios, time, identity," the studio finished.

Maison by Services Généraux

Service Généraux isn't the only studio to create a conceptual residence.

Back in 2017, Sergey Makhno Architects released visualisations of a weathered-steel holiday home in Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains, which the practice imagined would be occupied by a "contemporary nomad" in need of a rural get-away.