Scalable and transformable housing signed AIR, delivered to Malakoff

A stone's throw from the Malakoff-Etienne Dolet metro station, Stylea, a 33-unit building blends into its context with harmony and ingenuity. The result of extensive research work that is the agency's signature, Styléa offers a new way of living and designing one's home in the short and long term, over time and as needs change thanks to easily convertible apartments from studio to duplex T5, also promoting the intergenerational link.

The structure of traditional housing all too often remains fixed on a model from the 50s, in the face of constantly and rapidly changing lifestyles. It is clear that housing must now be able to adapt to each individuality and background, whether traditional, single-parent or blended families, single people, students or people in need of support.

The reflection of architects on the design of scalable housing then becomes essential. To respond to a changing world, AIR has designed a building that changes over time. This building offers accommodation capable of supporting its occupants throughout their lives, with its major news and its vagaries.

An aesthetic rooted in its environment

Nestled in a suburban street in Malakoff, the design of Styléa is inspired by neighboring houses. The building retains clean lines in the corners and retains the size of the houses that surround it. On the upper floors, small houses overhang the roof, as if to communicate with the more distant buildings. Light colors have been chosen to blend with the sky and offer a peaceful view.

The building was designed in this way in order to give it a double communication: on the one hand with its direct neighborhood and the surrounding houses but also with the distant districts more in height on the other hand.

Modular interiors according to life paths

From the reflection phase, the accommodations have been designed to be able to adapt to the changing needs of its inhabitants. Their combinations make it possible to modulate a T4 in T5 or in T4 and studios, thanks to a particular distribution of the apartments on the floors and the positioning of fuse walls or staircases in strategic places.

The first two floors of the building are vertically modular. A two-room apartment can then be connected to a studio upstairs by adding a fusible staircase hopper to become a four-room duplex. A second studio can be connected to the apartment to make a large five-room apartment of 118 m².

The modularity device also applies to the following floors, which will be horizontally convertible. Thus, two two-room apartments located side by side can become a four-room apartment.

Other devices are possible, allowing the dwellings to merge and become independent again according to needs and desires.