Contemporary Vernacular, holiday house in Corsica

WY-TO architects has designed a holiday house in Corsica. This monolithic building emerges from the natural and cultural environment of the French island to offer a contemporary take on architecture.

The WY-TO design firm based in France and Singapore has turned the design of a holiday house in the south-east part of Corsica into an expedient to combine local identity with sustainable solutions.

For the WY-TO team of architects, dropping the project into a scenic location with views of the mountains meant studying the natural environment and referencing it in the bold geometric lines of the traditional drywalls. This turns the building into an architectural construction where local “savoir faire” is brought together in a strikingly solid contemporary and monolithic building. This is manifested in the details, like the footprints left by the timber formwork used for the concrete floor of the interior that are a cheeky nod to the same wooden planks used on the outdoor patio and pool deck. Not to mention the locally sourced stones for the facades.

WY-TO is also very oriented towards sustainability, using low energy systems such as controlled ventilation, thermodynamic hot water boiler and thick outside walls to guarantee the facade's thermal inertia.

The result is an environmentally-friendly holiday house with all the comforts of contemporary living, and special attention to the territory, both in terms of local materials and local know-how, just as its name suggests, a perfect blend: Contemporary Vernacular.

Christiane Bürklein

Designer Firm: WY-TO Pte. Ltd.  www.wy-to.com
Project Team Members: Yann Follain (Head of Design Singapore, Co-Founder) Pauline Gaudry (Head of Design Paris, Co-Founder) Honorine Ponce (Architectural Designer Singapore, Development phases) Coralie Le Thiesse (Architectural Designer Paris, Construction phase)
Location: Corsica, France
Year: 2015
Photographer: Svend Andersen