Jacksonville, Florida – United States

The house is located on a corner plot of an acre in a private residential community with very restrictive building code, both from the volumetric point of view and the location of the house within the plot and from the style that the new construction will have. In our case, one of the allowed historical styles is chosen that responds to the name of a French chateau, with marked French-speaking characteristics (symmetry, sloping mansard roof, exterior finish ripped …).

With these premises and an extensive residential program that exceeds eight hundred square meters, there is a single elongated volume with a central body of two floors and two lateral bodies of height at the ends.

On the ground floor, the public program is developed, in the central body: the access, the double-height main hall, the dining room, the library and a guest room. The lower bodies house the kitchen, the service area and the garage, on one side, and the master bedroom and the gym, on the other. On the second floor, we find the night and more familiar program: three bedrooms, a game room and a movie theatre. The arrangement of the rooms on the ground floor tries to reproduce the sequence of typical spaces in the French historical buildings that open one above the other, without the need for corridors or corridors; in this way all the rooms that face the back garden communicate with each other, responding to this spatial organization of the French chateau and to certain programmatic functionality.

Following the typology of the urbanization, the front yard is open, intended for road access and parking of guest cars on the surface. Behind, a wooden pergola structure runs through the entire rear facade, which opens to the most private garden where we find the pool and a cabin with a bar and seating area.

The facades in this effort to reproduce a past architectonic style are composed following the classic precepts: a single type of hole repeated n times, symmetry and use of elements typical of classical orders such as cornices and mouldings. On the garden side, the scheme is made more flexible allowing larger openings with the intention of favouring the interior / exterior relationship.