Villa La Roche

The street grows quiet here. You leave the traffic of Auteuil behind, turn into a short private lane, and the sound of the city drops away. At the end of the cul-de-sac stands a white house that looks almost weightless. Smooth rendered walls. Long horizontal windows. One curved wing that seems to float above the ground on slender columns. Take a moment before you go in. This calm, pale building was a very loud idea in its day.

This is Villa La Roche, designed by the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier together with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret. It was built in the first half of the 1920s, in a residential corner of the sixteenth arrondissement, on the western edge of Paris. At the time, Le Corbusier was still a young architect. He was better known for his writing and his painting than for finished buildings. This house helped to change that.

The client was Raoul La Roche, a Swiss banker living in Paris. He was a bachelor, and he was a serious collector of modern art. He bought Cubist works by painters such as Picasso, Braque and Léger. He also collected Purism, a style that Le Corbusier and the painter Amédée Ozenfant developed after the First World War. Purism favoured clean outlines, flat colours and everyday objects such as bottles and glasses. So La Roche needed more than a home. He needed a place to live with his paintings.

Here is the first surprise. Villa La Roche is not a single detached house. Look closely at the long white façade. It is actually two homes joined together. The other half is Maison Jeanneret, built for Le Corbusier's brother, Albert Jeanneret, a musician, and his wife. From the lane, the two parts read as one composition. Inside, they had very different lives. One was a family home. The other was something closer to a private gallery.

Walk through the entrance and you arrive in a tall hall that rises through the full height of the house. Light comes in from high windows. A staircase climbs along one side. Above you, a small balcony projects into the space, like a pulpit or a viewing box. From here, the house opens in several directions at once. You are not shown one room after another down a corridor. You are invited to move, to climb, to look back at where you have just been.

Le Corbusier had a name for this experience. He called it the architectural promenade. The idea is simple. A building should be understood by walking through it, the way you understand a landscape by walking across it. Each turn of the stair, each change of level, gives you a new view. Villa La Roche is often described as one of the first buildings where he put this idea into practice. Pay attention to your own path as you move.

Now find the curved wing, the part that rests on columns outside. Inside is the picture gallery, where La Roche hung his collection. A ramp runs along the curved wall, rising gently from one level to the next. This is the second surprise. In the early 1920s, a ramp inside a private house was very unusual. Stairs were the normal choice. Here, the slow slope lets you walk past the walls at an easy pace, almost like a visitor in a museum.

Notice the colour, too. Many people imagine modernist houses as purely white. This one is not. Inside, walls carry soft shades of pale blue, warm ochre, light grey, deep brown and a muted pink. Le Corbusier used colour as a building tool. A darker wall can seem to move away from you. A warm wall can seem to come forward. Colour changes how large a space feels. Restoration work in later years brought these painted surfaces back closer to the original scheme.

The structure behind these walls is a frame of reinforced concrete. Because the frame carries the weight, the walls do not have to. That freedom explains much of what you see. The windows can stretch sideways in long bands. Rooms can open into each other. The curved gallery can lift off the ground on columns. Le Corbusier later summed up these ideas as his five points of a new architecture. This house already shows several of them, in an early and experimental form.

Living here was not always easy. Pure walls and large windows look elegant, but they also bring practical problems with heat, cold and light. Some accounts describe tensions between architect and client over the years, especially about how the paintings should hang in the gallery. It is a reminder that this was a real home, used by a real person. It was not only a manifesto in concrete. Design and daily life had to find a balance here.

Raoul La Roche lived in the house for decades. Later, the villa became the home of the Fondation Le Corbusier, the institution that looks after the architect's archive and legacy. Today the foundation uses it for visits and exhibitions, so you are welcome to walk where the collector once walked. Most of the original paintings are no longer here. Without them, you can focus more easily on the shapes, the light and the movement through the spaces.

In 2016, Villa La Roche and Maison Jeanneret joined a group of Le Corbusier buildings on the UNESCO World Heritage List. That listing covers works in several countries, from France and Switzerland to India and Japan. This modest Paris house sits in that list beside much larger projects. Its place there makes sense. Many ideas that later shaped apartment blocks, offices and whole new cities were first tested here, at domestic scale, on a quiet private lane.

Before you leave, step back outside and look at the house again from the end of the lane. Notice how the curved gallery catches the light differently from the flat façade. Notice the shadow under the columns. Listen to how quiet it still is. Then walk slowly back towards the street. As the ordinary Paris buildings return around you, with their stone fronts and iron balconies, you may see them a little differently after this white house.