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Deauville's Mighty Timbers
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18632 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
1,102 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
Marcus Binney, is president of Save Britain's Heritage. |
Mock Tudor has long been the most despised of styles and the most popular. At Deauville, on France's Normandy coast, it has been positively chic throughout the twentieth century. Here, in the resort that prides itself on being Paris' twenty-first arrondissement, half-timbering is de rigueur on every new apartment block--just as it was on a 1950s station wagon.
Some may recoil at the very mention of such a sham, but this policy has given Deauville an individuality and a consistency of character utterly in contrast to the hundreds of towns along the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean coasts that have surrendered their seafronts to an ugly rash of high-rise hotels and condos.
Deauville even insisted on colombage, as timbering is known in France, during the 1960s and 1970s. Then it was no more than a token gesture, but today the town has a young architect, Patrick Le Gosles, who is bringing new vigor to the style by using massive Normandy oaks to give modeling and silhouette to his buildings.
As Deauville is only two hours on the motorway from Paris, more and more families are buying secondary residences not only for the summer but for the weekends. On a Saturday in November the whole town can be seized by gridlock. Staying in the Normandy Hotel, which on completion in 1912 must have been the largest piece of colombage on the coast, you can watch the valets de chamber wheeling out racks of clothes along the corridors for regulars who leave their clothes behind for cleaning and pressing, while the maids set out family photographs on the tables to make them feel at home.
Modern apartment blocks are usually standardized affairs. Le Gosles gives them character with steep roofs, punctuated by dormers, and bold, vertical tiers of balconies (such as you might have found in the courtyard of an old coaching inn) crowned by large overhanging gables.
The formula works because the timbers are massive--of the dimensions one associates with shipbuilding. His timbers are not applied decoration but three-dimensional constructions giving carpenters opportunities they have not had for years.
All the apartments have standardized, modern plate-glass windows in very large sheets; Le Gosles' timbers are bold enough to obscure this. He even creates two-story, glass-front studios in the gables, but the glass is set back sufficiently to ensure it is almost
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