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 di Mandrot.

The first international congress of modern architecture was held in 1928 in the castle of La Sarraz in Switzerland, owned by the countess de Helene de Mandrot, a wealthy patron. On this occasion he meets Le Corbusier for the first time. In the summer of 1929 he asked him to design a small holiday home: "(…) I don't want to put much money, something like that of your mother with two rooms, four more beds and a garden.
Le Corbusier builds an L-shaped house with a reinforced concrete floor that supports a local stone wall built by a local entrepreneur in opus incertum which gives the villa a Mediterranean appearance that distinguishes it from other architect's works. The 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 facade on two levels is smooth which reveals the part of the basement.
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 works were immediately started to make the house habitable: waterproofing, plastering the walls, installing shutters, etc. – which slightly alter the original design.
Today the villa is privately owned. It has been classified as a historical monument since 1987 and has been awarded the title of "20th century heritage" by the Ministry of Culture.