This project came about at the perfect moment, when several aspirations converged. Matthieu had grown up in the countryside, while I had only ever lived in the city. When our son was born, we found ourselves dreaming of a place where he could grow up differently—running freely outdoors, building treehouses, and living in step with nature.

Our apartment in Marseille isn't particularly spacious, but we love it. Rather than moving to a larger home in the city, we chose to expand our lives somewhere greener.

But this is more than just a holiday home. We also wanted to create a true anchor for our family—a place where every generation could come together. That's why each grandparent—Matthieu's mother and my father—has a bedroom here. For my father, who had always dreamed of a cabin in the woods, we created the green bedroom, with its cube-like alcove opening onto the forest. He often stays there on his own. It was important to us that this house should be lived in, not simply opened up for a few weeks each summer.

Absolutely. I moved house around thirty times growing up. My parents, who were fairly unconventional, embraced a very particular kind of freedom: they valued emotional stability over material stability. We moved according to the people we met, the opportunities that arose, and whatever felt right at the time. I had never experienced what it meant to grow up with the same walls, the same books, the same objects around me year after year. For a long time, I believed that putting down roots was somehow incompatible with living a fulfilled life. Then I met Matthieu. He had grown up in the same family home, with a much more traditional sense of rootedness. Through him, I discovered that having a place of your own could inspire exactly the opposite of what I had imagined—it could nurture creativity, serenity and joy in abundance. Today, I've kept my parents' love of movement and change, but I've let go of the idea that you shouldn't become attached to places.

Because that's exactly what it is to me. My parents' home was filled with colour. It was vibrant, joyful and deeply instinctive. My mother, who was of Moroccan heritage, loved interiors that felt richly layered and full of life. I've held on to that love of colour, but I use it differently today. Over time, I realised that colour can create order.

It allows us to define spaces, assign them a purpose, almost create an architecture of its own. In our home, every room is conceived as its own territory. The house is laid out like a star: a central core where we come together as a family, with each person then retreating to their own space. That sense of independence already existed in my parents' home, but in a much more intuitive way. Here, it has been carefully designed. I love the idea that the physical environment can nurture our inner lives—that a well-organised home can, ultimately, make us feel much freer.

We're both highly creative, but we're also incredibly structured—borderline obsessive, even. Colour helps us create a real visual composition throughout the house. I have a very graphic approach to architecture. I often think about volumes as though I were composing a two-dimensional image. The colour blocking, the circulation, the sightlines... everything contributes to a narrative, almost like the panels of a comic strip.

Without a doubt, the bookcase. Every book in it belonged to my mother. She passed away before we bought the house, but her presence is everywhere here. In fact, the house is named after her nickname: Amatxo. In the Basque Country, where I grew up, ama means “mother”, while the suffix -txo is an affectionate diminutive. It was our tender way of saying “my little mum”. The bookcase brings together forty years of her reading—books on plants, aromatherapy, herbal medicine, and everything else that fascinated her. It is probably the strongest presence in the house.

At first, it was the setting we fell in love with. The house itself required quite a leap of imagination. Then we began looking into its history. It is part of a residential development conceived by developer and urban planner Adrien Beaumont, who championed the idea of a neighbourhood in harmony with nature. As he put it, it was to be “a house in a garden, a garden in a park.” The homes are scattered throughout the forest, almost invisible, as though they had always belonged there. At the time, the estate functioned as a kind of small-scale utopia. There was a youth centre, a pétanque court, a swimming pool and shared communal spaces. The idea was to recreate a sense of collective living while allowing everyone to maintain their privacy and their own relationship with nature. It was a response to the rise of mass development—particularly in tourism—in the 1970s. We found that vision incredibly inspiring. From that moment on, we thought: rather than erase the spirit of the era, why not reinterpret it?

A beautiful Provençal bastide didn't really need us. This house did. It had lost part of its story. What interested us was rediscovering its original intent and reinterpreting it through our contemporary lens.

Within twenty-four hours, we'd put together a mood board built around a pop, graphic, distinctly seventies visual language. That was the real turning point—the moment we could finally picture what the house could become.

Yes, it's almost our motto. People often imagine that creativity begins with a blank page and the freedom to do whatever you want. We see it exactly the other way around. The greater the constraints, the more inventive they force you to become.

This house is a perfect example. We could have stripped everything back, erased the 1970s, laid travertine flooring throughout and created just another Provençal house. But that was never the point. The constraints—many of them self-imposed—were already there: the history of the place, the existing materials, the landscape, the house's distinctly horizontal architecture. Those very constraints are what made the project so compelling.

The contractors would sometimes look at us in disbelief. We'd tell them we wanted to keep the bathroom tiles, install lino in the living room, and put carpet back in the bedrooms—everything they were used to ripping out. But those materials tell the story of their era. We didn't want to recreate them exactly as they were, simply to give them a place once again.

Yes, for instance, we closely follow the work of Spanish artist and designer Jaime Hayon. What resonates with us isn't just his colourful universe. It's the way he moves effortlessly between graphic design and product design, creating highly sophisticated objects that never lose their sense of lightness. His work has real depth, yet it never takes itself too seriously.

Our studio came about very organically. We started by designing objects for ourselves, then apartments, and eventually communication campaigns. We're not interested in being provocative. What we try to do is shift the perspective ever so slightly, so that everything suddenly feels obvious again. Over time, people began seeking us out for this cross-disciplinary way of thinking about projects. We often step in when everyone else has reached a dead end. Our clients come to us looking for a fresh perspective—a different way of seeing the problem.

We follow the sun, like sunflowers—one terrace in the morning, another in the evening. Life here is wonderfully simple. We head up to the village for a coffee, wander through the forest trails, have lunch beneath the trees, or spend time making something around the house. I grew up with a father who was always building things, and I've held on to that pleasure of making. Many of the elements in the house are handmade, including the large Space Age headboard in our bedroom and several of the pieces of furniture.

And then there are the deer! Everyone has seen them except Matthieu, who is convinced that this will be the day he finally spots the ones that wander past the house. Every morning, he stations himself at the kitchen window—only to miss them every single time. Meanwhile, my father photographs them constantly. It's become something of a family joke.

Our son notices everything: the rabbits, the foxes, the birds, even the tracks left by wild boar. And then there are the changing seasons. At nearly 700 metres above sea level, they're incredibly distinct—it's absolutely beautiful.

Because we genuinely love being on the move. When we lived in Paris, we each had our own apartment, and for a long time that's simply how we lived. In the end, we just relocated one of those apartments... to Marseille! We enjoy that constant back-and-forth between different places, different rhythms. It's a way of life that gives us room to breathe.

That said, we eventually settled on a family apartment in Marseille, while keeping a pied-à-terre in Paris, in the Marais. It's tiny, but we adore it—we renovated it entirely in shades of blue. Having our son has inevitably made life a little more structured, but we've held on to that feeling of regularly changing scenery. And then there's Tourtour, which completes the balance: it's our escape into nature.