Bauchet de La Bouvrie Wraps Four Timber Volumes Around a Courtyard for a Football Clubhouse in La Riche

Sports infrastructure rarely gets the architectural attention it deserves. Municipal clubhouses tend to be utilitarian boxes, built for hose-down durability and nothing more. So when Bauchet de La Bouvrie Architects was tasked with designing a new clubhouse for the Petit Plessis sports complex in La Riche, France, the result is notable precisely because it refuses to be ordinary. The 645-square-meter building completed in 2022 takes the familiar brief of locker rooms, a referee's office, and a social clubhouse and turns it into a courtyard pavilion with real spatial intelligence.

The plan is disarmingly simple: four single-story rectangular volumes sit on a square footprint and revolve around an open-air patio. A single sloping roof ties all four together, and four corner entrances feed into a sheltered perimeter corridor that connects every room without forcing anyone through the middle. It is a plan that separates the changing rooms from direct sightlines to the pitches while giving the clubhouse its own generous covered terrace. Positioned equidistant from the ground of honor and the training field, the building serves both without favoring either. Visible from the ring road to the west, it doubles as a gateway marker for the town.

A Courtyard That Organizes Everything

From the air, the logic is immediate. The dark standing-seam metal roof reads as a single square with a void punched through its center. That void, the central courtyard, is planted in a diagonal grid pattern that softens what could otherwise feel like an institutional precinct. The courtyard is not decorative; it is the organizing device. It provides daylight and ventilation to the interior corridors, separates noisy locker-room zones from the quieter social spaces, and gives the building an identity that no flat-roofed rectangle could achieve.

The single-pitched roof connecting all four volumes creates a subtle asymmetry. The roofline dips and rises as it wraps the courtyard, generating clerestory windows at the high edges and intimate covered walkways at the low ones. Each of the four volumes can operate independently, which is a smart move for a building whose rooms are used on different schedules by different groups.

Brick Base, Timber Crown

The facade strategy reads as two registers: a pale tan brick base anchors the building to the ground, and above it, a band of vertical and horizontal timber cladding wraps the upper volume. The brick absorbs the inevitable wear from footballers, maintenance equipment, and weather at grade level, while the wood above stays clean and warm. It is a practical decision that also gives the elevations a visual weight that keeps the low pavilion from looking flimsy.

Corner details reveal how carefully this layering was resolved. Glazed openings sit between the brick and the timber, allowing light to enter without interrupting either material's continuity. The overhanging eaves, supported by exposed timber rafters, shelter the windows and give the building deep shadow lines that change character throughout the day. Horizontal timber planks on some faces shift to vertical boards on others, a move that might seem decorative but actually corresponds to the structural bays behind the skin.

The Covered Walkway as Social Space

The perimeter corridor is arguably the most important room in the building. Accessed from four corner entrances, it is a continuous sheltered loop that links every program element. Timber columns march along its length, casting rhythmic shadows across the polished concrete floor. Vertical slat screens filter light and views, creating a transition zone between the fully enclosed rooms and the open courtyard. It is a cloister in athletic clothing.

This corridor does double duty as a social buffer. Players moving between the changing rooms and the pitches pass through it without entering the clubhouse. Spectators sitting on the covered terrace at the southeast corner can watch matches while staying dry. The beam ceiling is left fully exposed, with the wood structure doing its own finish work. There is no dropped ceiling, no hidden services. The honesty of the construction is the ornament.

Interior Warmth from Wood and Plywood

Inside, the material palette stays tight. Vertical timber cladding lines the walls, and plywood wraps the service counters and reception desks. Exposed timber beams run overhead, their rhythm matching the column grid of the walkways outside. The continuity between interior and exterior materials makes the building feel larger than its 645 square meters, because you never sense a hard boundary between in and out.

Continuous clerestory windows run above the counters and along the corridor edges, flooding the interior with even, indirect light. Mechanical ductwork is left visible, painted in muted tones and threaded between the structural beams. It is a straightforward approach to servicing that avoids expensive bulkheads and keeps the ceiling plane legible. The overall effect is warm without being twee, an atmosphere closer to a well-built boathouse than to the fluorescent-lit changing blocks that most amateur athletes know too well.

Reading the Building from the Pitch

From the sports fields, the clubhouse reads as a low horizontal line with a timber-and-brick face, hovering just above the grass. Its modesty is deliberate. A taller building here would compete with the open sky that makes playing sports outdoors worthwhile. The clerestory windows at the roofline catch light and signal that there is activity inside without drawing excessive attention.

The cantilevered roof at the corners creates covered open areas that extend the building's footprint informally. These overhangs are where teams gather before and after matches, where parents wait, where conversations happen. They are the thresholds between the building and the landscape, and the architects were smart to make them generous. A narrow overhang would have been forgotten; a deep one becomes a room.

Facade Details at Close Range

At dusk, the ribbon windows glow against the dark timber, and the building shifts from a daytime civic object to something quieter and more domestic. The picture windows at the upper band are sized to frame specific views: the pitches, the treeline, the ring road. Exposed rafter tails at the soffit line give the eaves a handcrafted quality that you do not expect from a municipal sports building.

Signage is applied directly to the horizontal timber siding on the entrance facade, treating the wood as a surface rather than hiding it behind a panel. It is a small decision, but it tells you that the architects saw the cladding as finished material, not substrate. The grain shows through, and the lettering weathers alongside the wood.

Corridor Light and Shadow

The glazed doors and vertical slat screens along the corridors create a layered transparency. You can see through the building in some directions and not others, depending on where you stand and how the light falls. This play of depth keeps the circulation from feeling like a hallway. It feels like a sequence of outdoor rooms, each one slightly different in character.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan confirms what the aerial photographs suggest: four rectangular volumes framing a generous courtyard, with perimeter columns defining the covered walkways. The north and west blocks house the players' locker rooms, the east block contains the referees' facilities and the sports association office, and the south block holds the clubhouse, laundry, infirmary, and storage. The section details reveal a carefully considered wall assembly. Insulation layers are thick and continuous, the window frames are set into precise openings within the timber structure, and the corner glazing conditions are resolved with custom framing. The elevation drawings show the relationship between the brick base and the timber crown with a clarity that the photographs can only approximate.

Why This Project Matters

The La Riche Clubhouse matters because it proves that everyday public buildings can have spatial ambition without inflated budgets or formal gymnastics. A courtyard plan, a wood frame, brick at the base, timber above: none of these moves are new. But the discipline with which Bauchet de La Bouvrie has assembled them turns a modest program into a building that athletes and visitors will actually enjoy occupying. The covered walkway alone is worth the effort, a social space that costs almost nothing to maintain but transforms how the building is experienced.

Too often, sports architecture is split between spectacular stadiums and forgettable sheds. Projects like this one demonstrate a third path: careful, material-driven design applied to the buildings that communities use every weekend. La Riche now has a clubhouse that does its job quietly and well, and that, from the ring road, tells passing drivers that this town takes its public spaces seriously.

La Riche Clubhouse, designed by Bauchet de La Bouvrie Architects, La Riche, France. 645 m². Completed in 2022. Photography by Simon Bauchet.

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