Sigurd Larsen Turns a 400-Year-Old Auvergne Barn into a Crimson Holiday Retreat

A family whose roots in the mountain villages of Auvergne stretch back more than four centuries owned a steel-framed barn on a forested hilltop overlooking the Puy de Dôme volcanic range. That barn no longer stores hay. Berlin-based architect Sigurd Larsen has stripped the structure back to its bones, kept the original steel frame, and rebuilt it as a 1,507-square-foot holiday house that treats the western horizon like a screen and the sunset like a nightly feature film.

What makes La Grange Rouge compelling is not the barn conversion itself, a familiar genre by now, but Larsen's refusal to treat the interior as a single open loft. Instead, three bedrooms are designed as independent tiny houses clustered beneath one sweeping roof, separated by a communal area that functions more like a village plaza than a living room. Add a kitchen block as a fourth enclosure, a dining table aimed directly at the valley, and an outdoor bathtub tucked under the eaves, and you get a project that oscillates between collective ritual and private withdrawal with unusual precision.

A Steel Frame Dressed in Deep Red

The retained steel frame is the structural and conceptual anchor of the project. Larsen painted it a deep red intended to evoke cast iron, but the effect is more visceral than nostalgic. Against the greens of the Auvergne forest, the house reads as a signal fire on the hilltop. Corrugated metal cladding wraps parts of the exterior, lending an agricultural frankness that keeps the project from sliding into preciousness.

The color choice is deliberate beyond aesthetics. It ties the architecture to the warm tones of sunset that flood the site every evening, so the building and the sky converge in a shared palette for an hour each day. Ornamental grasses and dry meadow plants at the thresholds soften the transition from metal to earth, blurring where the building ends and the rewilded landscape begins.

Rooms as Tiny Houses Under One Roof

Each of the three bedrooms is oriented so you see the valley from the pillow. That sounds like a luxury-hotel cliché, but in this case the move is structural: the bedroom enclosures are rotated and positioned like freestanding cabins, with the gaps between them forming the shared living zone. Corner windows in the bedrooms frame the landscape tightly, almost cinematically, so the views feel composed rather than accidental.

Red-painted timber walls inside the sleeping enclosures create a warm, enveloping atmosphere that shifts tone depending on the time of day. Morning light through the vertical cladding slots produces amber stripes across floors and walls. By dusk, warm pendant lamps take over, and the interiors glow like lanterns visible from outside. It is a house that performs differently at every hour, which is precisely the point of Larsen's theatre-stage metaphor.

The Communal Space as a Plaza

The central gathering area sits between the bedroom modules and the kitchen block, framed by red steel columns and the exposed timber gable overhead. Full-height glazing on the valley side eliminates the wall entirely, so the room feels like a covered terrace as much as an interior. The dining table extends toward the glass, and the ceiling rises to reveal the full geometry of the original barn roof, giving the space a generosity that belies the modest footprint.

Lighting by Louis Poulsen, specifically tiered pendant fixtures suspended above the table, lends the meals a Scandinavian warmth that pairs surprisingly well with the French vernacular shell. Furniture sourced from local flea markets introduces a layer of specificity and imperfection that factory-new pieces could never provide. The result is a room that feels both designed and lived in, a difficult balance Larsen handles with confidence.

Sunset as Program

Larsen describes the house as a stage for nature's daily performance, and the west-facing orientation is the mechanism that makes that claim literal rather than poetic. The common area frames the western horizon so directly that the sunset becomes an event you sit down for, like dinner. The floor-to-ceiling glazing turns the sky into an enormous painting that shifts from gold to crimson, and the deep red of the steel frame catches and amplifies those tones in the periphery.

It is worth noting how rarely architects commit this fully to a single orientation. Most houses hedge their bets with views in every direction. La Grange Rouge picks a side: the valley, the volcanoes, the sunset. Everything, the bedroom alignment, the table placement, the seating islands scattered through the meadow, points west. That conviction gives the project a narrative arc that unfolds with the clock.

Texture and Detail at Close Range

At the scale of a door handle or a grout line, La Grange Rouge reveals a material intelligence that complements the larger compositional moves. The shower enclosure is lined with vertical terracotta tiles in a grid pattern, a warm counterpoint to the corrugated metal and painted steel elsewhere. The white grout reads almost like mortar, connecting the contemporary tile work back to older masonry traditions.

Slots in the red timber cladding admit controlled slices of light, functioning as vertical windows that maintain privacy while keeping the bedrooms connected to the shifting sky outside. These narrow openings are the detail that most clearly illustrates Larsen's interest in light as a building material. They transform the interior walls into instruments that register time, weather, and season.

Why This Project Matters

Barn conversions have become so common they risk becoming a genre with diminishing returns. La Grange Rouge sidesteps that problem by refusing the obvious loft-style open plan and instead proposing a micro-urban strategy: distinct volumes sharing a covered public space. The result is a house that accommodates both sociability and solitude without forcing either, a quality that makes it genuinely useful as a holiday home for extended families or groups of friends.

More broadly, the project demonstrates what happens when an architect takes landscape seriously as program rather than backdrop. The rewilded meadows, the scattered furniture islands, the bathtub under the eaves, and above all the relentless westward orientation turn the natural setting into an active participant in daily life. Sigurd Larsen has not merely preserved a barn or designed a house. He has built a device for watching the sky.

La Grange Rouge House by Sigurd Larsen, Vollore Montagne, Auvergne, France. 1,507 sq ft. Completed 2025. Photography by KKROM Services.

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