A design study for a Provençal bastide arriving through a lit stone archway — grand, symmetric and quietly formal, with a curved stone stair at its centre.
Category
Provençal Residence
Status
Self-initiated Design Study
Scope
Spatial Direction · Interior Design · Materiality · FF&E
Creative direction and interior design — Nara Interiors
The study imagines a formal approach: a gravel court framed by cypress and olive trees, leading through a deep stone archway lit low along the ground. The façade stays symmetric and restrained, in the tradition of a French country house.
Inside, the arrival continues through a single, memorable moment — a curved stone stair over a checkerboard marble floor, hand-finished travertine treads and lighting recessed low along each step. Everything beyond it is kept deliberately quiet.
The approach is timed for late afternoon, when low light travels the length of the stone archway and settles across the checkerboard floor inside — the study treats that moment of arrival as the project's real subject, more than any single room beyond it.
The scheme proposes a single stone language across the arrival sequence: checkerboard marble underfoot, honed travertine on the stair treads, terracotta roof tile above. Smoked oak and warm brass appear only in the detailing — door hardware, stair lighting — never as a competing material, so the stone itself remains the room's focus.
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