Restoration, Le Panier
Maison de la Rampe
A three-window house, the classic Marseille terrace, with a stair that broke every rule and a roof that let the rain in.
Maison de la Rampe, Le Panier
Sorre, since 2016
Houses in Marseille, drawn for the people who will live in them and built with the trades who know the stone.
The team
Nadia and Louis, two architects in one room near the old port, with a mason, a plasterer and a joiner they trust.
The territory
Marseille, the Estaque and the coast as far as La Ciotat.
The method
Each architect runs one house at a time, so nobody at Sorre is ever juggling ten sites.
Four kinds of work
Two names on every drawing
Nadia trained on social housing in Lyon; Louis came to architecture from a carpentry workshop. Sorre is what they set up when they moved south in 2016.
Nadia
Architect
Louis
Architect, site lead
There are no juniors at Sorre and nothing goes to an outside drafting office. If a line on a plan surprises you, the person who drew it is the one who explains it.
On site now
Two houses in two corners of the city this year: a three-window house in Le Panier and a new house cut into a slope at Allauch.
New house, Allauch
Maison des Pins
Cut into a slope of old dry-stone terraces, so that every room steps straight out onto the ground at its own level.
Wind and shade
The mistral blows one day in three and the summer sun is hard. Both shape the plan before any wish list does.
The mistral
Doors and terraces turn their backs to the north-west; the windows on that side stay small, deep and few.
The shade
Loggias, pergolas and slatted shutters do the cooling. They go into the first sketch, never at the end.
Do you have a house or a plot in mind?
Three things help us answer well: where the house is, a plan or a sketch if you have one, and when you hope to move in.