Maison Louis Carré, a modernist dream by Alvar Aalto

It’s raining cats and dogs. The bronze gate opens onto a tree-lined gravel driveway that you hurry up, fleeing the storm. Then, in a bend, the house stands out between the branches, a sort of white triangle with a single sloping roof. We take refuge under the portico that protects the main entrance. Supported by columns clad in copper and “fins” in teak, it is open to the right on the countryside. In the pool alongside it, a frog perched on a leaf stares at us before plunging back into the water spangled with raindrops.

We pass the porch and here we are in the hall. Inside, a vast space bathed in golden light unfolds before us under the extraordinary Finnish pine ceiling which undulates like a wave and descends towards the windows of the living room below, a panoramic picture of the verdant landscape.

woodworking and light

Built at the end of the 1950s in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, in the Yvelines, the Louis Carré villa is the only building in France designed by the Finnish designer and architect Alvar Aalto. And the only private house where all the exterior and interior fittings, down to the door handles and the furniture, are signed by him. This masterpiece of architecture and design, listed as a Historic Monument since 1996, was the final resting place of Louis Carré, one of the most influential post-war French art collectors and dealers.

A great lover of primitive and modern art, he worked for the recognition of Paul Klee, Juan Gris, Kupka, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Raoul Dufy and many others. He is close to Le Corbusier, whose glass building he lived at 24, rue Nungesser-et-Coli, in Paris, and whose paintings he was the first to exhibit. But at the time of building his house, on these 3 hectares surrounded by fields of wheat and barley on the edge of the forest of Rambouillet, it was not to Le Corbusier that he entrusted the project, fearing his “concrete side, a little rough”. At almost 60 years old, the gallery owner wants to get out of Parisian life and settle in a house designed to live, work, receive his friends or clients and exhibit his collection.

It is Fernand Léger and the art historian Will Grohmann who talk to Louis Carré about Alvar Aalto. At 58, he is at the height of his career – Frank Lloyd Wright speaks of him as a genius – but remains very little known in France. A pioneer of organic architecture, inspired by the forms of nature, and fond of Japanese aesthetics, he distinguished himself very early on from the austerity and coldness of the Bauhaus. Committed as much to design as to architecture, he set up, with his team in 1935, the furniture publishing house Artek, where woodworking, light and the well-being of the user are at the heart of creative center.

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