Avenue is a minimalist house located in Oise, France, designed by Cent 15 Architecture. The most consequential material in this house is the one nobody will ever see. Straw bales, packed into prefabricated timber box sections, do the thermal work that would otherwise fall to mechanical systems, and their absence from the finished rooms is precisely the point. Cent 15, the Paris studio founded by Maxime Scheer in 2011, has built its reputation on resource logic rather than formal signature, and Avenue reads as an argument that comfort is a design outcome, not an equipment purchase. There is no air conditioning here and no heat recovery ventilation. Orientation, cross ventilation, solar shading, envelope quality and thermal mass carry the load instead.
The site is long, narrow and heavily wooded, and the plan answers that geometry with three volumes set slightly out of alignment with one another. The offsets are not a compositional flourish. Each shift opens a different face to the surrounding trees, multiplying orientations and letting living spaces run east to west while still drawing southern light. Each volume holds a distinct moment of family life, semi-autonomous without being sealed off, which produces a house that can be inhabited differently by different people at the same hour.
Materially, the palette is timber and earth, with concrete reserved for infrastructure and the basement. Raw earth plaster covers the interior walls, and its behavior explains its presence: unfired clay buffers humidity and stores heat, releasing both slowly, which is what allows a house of 330 square meters to stay temperate through a French summer without compressors. The finish itself has a fine mineral grain that absorbs light rather than reflecting it, softening the exposed spruce joists overhead. Boltshauser Architekten and Martin Rauch have spent decades arguing for earth as a structural and climatic material in the Alps, and Sarah Wigglesworth made straw legible in a British urban context at Stock Orchard Street. Avenue sits in that lineage but declines the didactic gesture entirely. Nothing is left exposed to prove a point.
Exterior cladding is open jointed vertical timber, already silvering unevenly where the trees throw shade, and the roughness of that surface plays against the tight cabinetry inside, where wide sheets of figured plywood run floor to ceiling in the entry and bedrooms. Ground floor slabs are polished cast concrete, warm underfoot from embedded heating fed by a log fired biomass boiler; parquet takes over upstairs. Windows are triple glazed units from Bildau and Bussmann, set in deep timber reveals that read almost as thickened wall openings, with the smallest of them framing fragments of woodland like hung pictures.
