Set on the grass of a former stud farm in the Vexin, a six-shell Bulle house designed by Jean-Benjamin Maneval is reborn under the hand of Dorothée Meilichzon. 

A retro-futuristic creation of 36 square meters, orchestrated by the KIF studio, where the molded polyester of the 1960s finds a second life to the rhythm of the orange carpet and the Arabescato marble.

In the heart of the Vexin region, amidst the tranquil greenery of a former equestrian estate, an ovoid silhouette emerges from the tall grass like a vision of the future from the past. This reinforced polyester structure, pierced with large plexiglass openings, is not a contemporary whim: it belongs to a unique chapter in the history of French architecture, a domestic utopia conceived by Jean-Benjamin Maneval, a French architect and urban planner who sketched the first designs for his Bubble House in 1963. Designed as an experimental response to the question of holiday accommodation, and mass-produced between 1968 and 1970, the six-shell Bubble House was part of the broader modernist discussion on prefabrication, ergonomics, and the elimination of foundations. Maneval, who also designed urban planning projects in France during the Trente Glorieuses (Thirty Glorious Years), championed an organic logic: the egg shape, he essentially argued, belongs to nature, to the living cell, to biological organs. The right angle, on the other hand, was a matter of technical convenience, a convention that needed to be abandoned in order to bring housing closer to the principles of life.

Fifty years later, this ambition remains remarkably intact. In 2014, a collector acquired an authentic 1968 Bubble House at auction, which he then installed on his family estate in the Vexin region, within the walls of a former stud farm transformed into the setting for an architectural reverie. An empty shell at the time of purchase, originally designed without furniture, the Bubble awaited its interior design. The artistic direction was entrusted to the interdisciplinary creative studio KIF, founded by Guillaume Furet and Mélissa Louis, whose mission is precisely to foster dialogue between artists, designers, and craftspeople. Their intuition? To conceive of this rare object as a hotel suite nestled in nature, making it a capsule of conviviality rather than a residence, a place for entertaining rather than a functional dwelling. To bring this vision to life, they enlisted Dorothée Meilichzon, founder of the CHZON studio, whose style has established itself in recent years in the Parisian hotel and restaurant industry through its graphic precision and its taste for expertly recomposed references. 

Faced with this blank canvas of a very particular kind, the designer imposed a discipline upon herself: to follow Maneval's vision rather than contradict it. Each piece of furniture was designed to evoke the double curve of the shell, deliberately rejecting right angles. The bespoke furniture thus adopts the same curved logic as the shell, in a form of structural mimicry that blurs the line between container and contents. This approach transforms the six shells into as many autonomous spaces, each dedicated to a specific function—sleeping, washing, dining, entertaining, contemplating—without ever disrupting the overall visual unity. The common thread of this continuity is a thick, orange-brown velvet carpet that covers the floor and adorns the base of the curves, a tactile extension of a resolutely revisited 1970s palette. 

The bedroom-shell, treated like a cocoon, features Edinburgh Weavers fabric with ethnic patterns stretched to the ceiling, while the bar-shell, clad in stainless steel, evokes a time capsule. A lamp Chimera Vico Magistretti's lamp diffuses its milky light throughout the living room, echoing an Axel Chay floor lamp positioned opposite the large entrance bay. A shell entirely clad in walnut deliberately breaks with the surrounding polyester: its sliding door conceals a custom-built dressing room, a warm counterpoint to the futuristic coldness of the other alcoves. Finally, the bathroom develops the bubble's refined tone with a mosaic tile and Arabescato marble whose indistinct veining echoes the organic lines of the exterior shell.

At the center of the arrangement are two poufs. Mushroom A piece by Pierre Paulin and a table surrounded by four vintage armchairs create a living room. Paulin's presence is not insignificant: it connects the revisited Bubble to a French lineage of organic design, one that successfully asserted the sensuality of the curve in the face of the rigor of international modernism. The whole, photographed with admirable restraint by Karel Balas, never succumbs to the easy trap of pastiche. Maneval's Bubble is not reconstructed like a museum piece: it is inhabited, perpetuated, rewritten. The intervention of Dorothée Meilichzon and KIF amounts to saying that a modern heritage only has meaning if it continues to be interpreted, that a utopian architecture of the past is earned through use, not preservation. In the land of manor houses and longhouses, this tiny polyester vessel reminds us that another France exists, more experimental, more playful, more open to fiction. A France that dared, for a moment, to believe that one could live in an egg – and that, thanks to a few right-thinking people, still dares.