Villa l'Artaude (Maison de Mandrot)

Le Corbusier – Maison de Mandrot, Le Pradet (Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur), France, 1930-1931

Villa l'Artaude, also called Villa Mandrot, is a simple house with rough stone walls built by Le Corbusier in 1930 on the Artaude path in Le Pradet (east of Toulon, in the Var department) for Hélène de Mandrot.

The first international congress of modern architecture was held in 1928 in the castle of La Sarraz in Switzerland, property of the Countess de Helene de Mandrot, a wealthy patron. On this occasion she meets Le Corbusier for the first time. In the summer of 1929 she asks him to design a small holiday home: “(…) I don’t want to invest a lot of money, something like your mother’s with two rooms, four more beds and a garden.
Le Corbusier builds an L-shaped house with a reinforced concrete floor supporting a local stone wall made by a local contractor in uncertain work which gives the villa a Mediterranean look that distinguishes it from the architect's other works. Glass walls close everything. The villa opens to the south onto a garden terrace, closed on 3 sides and overlooking the slope of the land.
To the north, the two-level facade is smooth which reveals the basement part.
The garden was embellished with two sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz: The Song of Vowels (1931) and Recumbent Nude with Guitar (1928).

The Countess de Mandrot moved there in July 1931. New work was immediately started to make the house habitable: waterproofing, plastering the walls, installing shutters, etc. – which slightly altered the original project.
Today the villa is privately owned. It has been classified as a historical monument since 1987 and has been awarded the title of “Heritage of the XNUMXth Century” by the Ministry of Culture.