Villa M, a Green Spot in the Parisian Urban Jungle
In the heart of Montparnasse, a new mixed-use complex hides its metallic structure beams by medicinal herbal plants and fruit trees. Villa M is the perfect combination between nature and a human-centered mission.
Designed by French-Brazilian Triptyque Architecture, with architectural design and art direction of the spaces signed by Philippe Starck, Villa M aims to create a new pact between cities, nature, and health. A true naturalistic manifest is the correct definition of Villa M. A humble but well-thought mixed-use complex located in Boulevard Pasteur. There is no opposition between nature and the living.
The programme, imagined by Thierry Lorente and Amanda Lehmann of Groupe Pasteur Mutualité, is a mixed use building including a Hotel by Paris Society, a coworking, and a dynamic healthcare-focused centre. Thierry Lorentz, Villa M Concept Creator and CEO of Group Pasteur Mutualité explains his goal to go beyond the rational hospitality of a hotel and also offering a shelter and working space of health professionals. Designed before the Covid-19 pandemic, Villa M’s groundbreaking programme catalyses the idea of opening healthcare to the city, and the city to healthcare.
“Villa M is a bubbling, honest, and warm place, where life is good and beautiful. Throughout the restaurant and the bar, fertile surprises, hidden places, and mental games arouse curiosity and guide the gaze of visitors, reminding them that intelligence is one of the most beautiful symptoms of humanity. The traveller must feel at home, in calm, soft, and maternal rooms, so that the human being is always at the heart of the concept.”
Its architecture stands out with its living building, whose geometry is formed by metallic structure beams, conceived to house medicinal herbal plants, fruit trees, and medium to large sized perennial species. Designed as an exoskeleton, the building has a minimalist, light look, composed by prefabricated pieces as in a building game. “The edifice itself is the support for this vertical garden, which will grow and occupy the entire façade, turning the building into a vertical, medicinal forest, and becoming the main architecture," explains Olivier Raffaelli, Triptyque partner and architect designer of Villa M.
In addition to the reintegration of nature to the city through architecture, the living-building contributes with sustainability, since it collaborates with the thermal comfort and, therefore, with the building’s energetic efficiency. “We have explored all of the available surfaces to potentialize the greenery and to avoid energy and carbon waste," explains Gui Sibaud, Triptyque partner and architect designer of Villa M. The environmental responsibility is also present in the basic and organic material choices, proposing a low-tech architecture.
Villa M’s design is intended for the architecture to bring nature back to the city, with the main goal to provide citizens with a new urbane experience with the advent of a “nature-city”.
“Breathing, sunbathing, and connecting to nature are vital needs that the urban lifestyle is no longer able to guarantee," states partner Olivier Rafaëlli. “To resist the urban expansion – unsustainable by nature - the city must provide this experience in addition to stimulating the correlation between external and internal spaces in built areas."
The building’s 8,000 m² occupation programme also bring an innovative proposal: being a dedicated space for those who chose to help save lives – but open to everyone. The mixed-use complex holds a hotel, restaurant, bar, conference area, a check-up area, a co-working space, and a showroom for start-ups in the world of health to promote mixing, exchanges, and mutual aid between the different specialties and the different generations of health professionals.
Villa M, a Paris Society Hotel
The hotel offers 67 rooms and 6 suites designed as green spaces. Some of them have a balcony or terrace to admire the Montparnasse and Invalides districts. On the seventh floor the Pasteur Suite features an exceptional suite with large bay windows, a double green terrace, and a living room open to the capital.
It also features the essentials of a high-end hotel - a boxing and fitness club, and yoga rooms - but also 20 open offices and co-working spaces.
Good Living, Good Eating
Upon entering, the visitor is plunged into a place of life, energy, and benevolence: an Agora made of wood and concrete, vegetation, a friendly welcome, an open kitchen. The décor evokes the playful and erudite spirit of the French Riviera, where one forgets time, and where we feel good.
The vast and luminous restaurant is highlighted by wood, leather, shelves of books, mismatched furniture that seems to have a history, large armchairs, wide benches covered with cushions, and ludic surprises. A plural and joyful universe, and a signature of the Paris Society places.
The RoofTop
On the top floor, the RoofTop, with its incredible view of the Eiffel Tower, the Dôme des Invalides, and the roofs of Paris, remains an unparalleled experience.
Villa M is the title Building of the Year 2022, by ArchDaily.
