Le Kiosque
Caen, France
Le Kiosque is a timber house of 110 square metres at the bottom of a garden in Caen, in Normandy, built in 2024 by the studio arba- for Isabelle and Patrice Girard-Donnat. The couple had left the Paris region for a 1950s stone house they first visited in 2018, taken for its back garden beside a former limestone quarry; the new house went at the far end of that garden, and the name is a nod to the open-walled kiosks in French parks. The studio's own line: the house sits at the bottom of the garden "tel un kiosque dans un parc", like a kiosk in a park. A timber platform rides on concrete ground beams and steel screw piles; the frame is local fir, the cladding and joinery larch, the roof standing-seam zinc, the partitions hemp brick with earth render, the heat a wood stove. Four private rooms take the four corners, and the cross-shaped common space between them is, in the studio's words, "un jardin abrité, une sorte de kiosque", a sheltered garden, a kind of kiosk. The roof answers the local planning envelope and lifts to make room for the upstairs studio. Isabelle, in Dwell: "We want to live here, not there". The house is one of the ten laureates of the Prix National de la Construction Bois 2025, in its Habiter une maison category; the timber engineering was by Konstruktif, the carpentry by Tosco Entreprise and the joinery by Menuiserie Joly & Co.
The card is the kitchen, the third frame of Dwell's post, photographed by Jérémie Léon: a long run of cabinets in oiled birch, the organiser's brochure says, under a panelled wall, a white farmhouse sink, a shelf of jars in their own pigeonholes, two metal pendants, and the glazed door to the garden, with the ceiling rising overhead where the roof lifts for the studio above. Bookshelves close the frame at both edges.
arba-
arba- is the architecture studio of Jean-Baptiste Barache and Sihem Lamine; its own site lists twenty-three built works, Le Kiosque among them.
arba.pro · Jean-Baptiste Barache on Instagram
Architecture Jean-Baptiste Barache (@jean_baptiste_barache) and Sihem Lamine of arba-. Photography @jeremieleon. Story Bennett DiDonna. Seen via @dwellmagazine.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.