Villa Cavrois: The Modern Chateau That Became a Manifesto

On the hill of Beaumont in Croix, a 60-metre wall of yellow brick breaks with everything around it. When Robert Mallet-Stevens completed the Villa Cavrois in 1932 for the textile industrialist Paul Cavrois and his wife Lucie, the respectable suburb outside Roubaix got something it had not asked for: a modernist manifesto organized like a seventeenth-century chateau, designed down to the last door handle, and entirely indifferent to the taste of the neighbours. Nearly a century later it remains one of the most startling houses in France, and the most complete statement of what its architect believed a modern house could be.

The villa still reads as a wager: that a family house could be organized like a ship, heated like a factory and finished like a jeweller's box, with no concession to nostalgia.

The commission began modestly. Paul Cavrois, whose company Cavrois-Mahieu had grown since 1865 into a cotton and wool spinning, weaving and dyeing operation with five factories and nearly 700 employees by 1923, first bought land in Croix in 1922 and 1923 to house his family of seven children at a healthy distance from the factory chimneys. His first architect, Jacques Gréber, proposed a neo-regionalist house in the local style; the drawings came to nothing. In 1929 Cavrois turned instead to Robert Mallet-Stevens, the far more radical architect he had probably met four years earlier at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where the pavilion for the Roubaix and Tourcoing textile industry stood beside the architect's own tourism pavilion. Cavrois gave him complete freedom, provided he kept strictly to budget.

A modern chateau

Mallet-Stevens imagined the villa as a veritable modern chateau. Chateau, because of its imposing proportions: a 60-metre facade and a symmetrical two-wing layout inherited from the seventeenth-century aristocratic residence, with the parents' wing to the east and the children's and servants' quarters to the west, both arranged around the central vestibule and the great hall-salon. Modern, because of the simplicity of its volumes, the absence of ornament, the multiplication of roof terraces, and the use of industrial materials and techniques: glass, metal, steel, a reinforced concrete frame.

The yellow brick is the building's signature. After a 1930 visit to Willem Marinus Dudok's town hall in Hilversum, in the Netherlands, Mallet-Stevens had twenty-six different moulds made so the brick could wrap every corner and curve of the composition. It was an audacious material in a region of red brick, and it pulled the whole long building into one continuous horizontal gesture. The terraces, with their white railings, read like the decks of an ocean liner; the central tower, holding the stair of honour, gives the vertical counterpoint.

Technology was part of the thesis. The architect's programme for the house read like a manifesto of its own: air, light, work, sports, hygiene, comfort and efficiency. Central heating, an elevator, telephony between rooms, electric clocks and radio loudspeakers set into the walls, hot and cold water plus softened water for cooking and drinking: the equipment of the house was as designed as the architecture. In the basement laundry a mangle, an ironing machine and a drying closet served the work clause; a 27-metre swimming pool served the sports clause; and a long reflecting pool extended the villa's central axis into the park, in the manner of Le Nôtre.

The total work

Mallet-Stevens did not stop at the architecture. He designed the entire interior décor down to the smallest piece of furniture, taking to the extreme the concept of the total work that he defended within the Union des Artistes Modernes. His years as a film set designer show in the interiors: the black door that opens from the vestibule onto the hall-salon is framed by light boxes like a cinema set, of the kind he had designed for Marcel L'Herbier's films, and mirrors are used to break and double the space throughout the house.

Luxury here lies in materials, not ornament. The parents' dining room is lined in green Swedish marble, walls and floor, with black lacquered furniture; the fireplace alcove of the hall-salon is wrapped in yellow Siena marble with built-in leather banquettes; Cuban mahogany, zebrawood and oak parquet appear room by room, each space assigned its own palette and character. The hierarchy of the house is legible everywhere: noble materials for the reception rooms, clinical metal and white tile for the kitchen and bathrooms, where hygiene was itself the design language.

The villa was inaugurated on 5 July 1932, on the occasion of the wedding of Geneviève Cavrois, the couple's eldest daughter, three years after the commission. Mallet-Stevens's archives have since disappeared, which makes the villa, by the Centre des monuments nationaux's own account, the most accomplished example of his architectural thinking and his most emblematic achievement. It is the built manifesto against which his paper manifestos can no longer be checked.

Ruin and rescue

War interrupted the story. The family left for Normandy and the German army requisitioned the villa as barracks, later destroying the reflecting pool because it was too visible to British aviators. After the Liberation the house returned to the Cavrois family, and Paul Cavrois asked the architect Pierre Barbe to alter the interior, creating two apartments for the couple's sons in the west wing while he and Lucie kept the east section. After Madame Cavrois's death in 1986, the property was sold to a developer who planned to subdivide the park.

Abandoned and unmaintained, the villa was looted, vandalised and occupied by squatters for more than a decade. It had been listed as a historic monument in 1990 thanks to the mobilisation of a citizen preservation association, and in 2001 the French state, through the Ministry of Culture, purchased the building and the central part of the park. Thirteen years of work and 23 million euros followed. The regional directorate for cultural affairs began emergency restoration in 2003; the Centre des monuments nationaux took over in 2008, completing the park and the interiors by May 2015 under the supervision of Michel Goutal, chief architect of historic monuments. The villa reopened to the public in June 2015.

What the restoration chose to keep

The guiding decision was to return the villa to its 1932 state. The project drew on in-depth historical and archaeological research and the work of highly qualified craftsmen to restore Mallet-Stevens's design as faithfully as possible: the water mirror was rebuilt, the park replanted, the lighting, floors, wall coverings and paintwork restored, and furniture that had been dispersed at auction traced and in many cases brought back, with missing pieces remade to the architect's designs. The former wine cellar now holds a materials library of the villa's fabrics, a record of the restoration itself.

But the restoration refused total amnesia. One room on the upper floor, in the children's wing, was deliberately left unrestored, to show the extent of the damage done in the decades of abandonment. It is the one room where the manifesto is not a reconstruction but a ruin, and it anchors everything else: proof of how close this building came to disappearing. The thirteen-year restoration chose to preserve both the 1932 house and the memory of what almost happened to it.

Nearly a century on, the yellow brick still shocks against the red-brick suburb, and the villa still reads as a wager: that a bourgeois family house could be organized like a ship, heated like a factory and finished like a jeweller's box, with no concession to nostalgia. Mallet-Stevens wrote his manifestos in books, in film sets and in the rooms of the Union des Artistes Modernes. At Croix he wrote one in brick, marble and glass, and the restoration's greatest fidelity may be that it let the building keep arguing.