With the help of Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, the couple spent several years meticulously reimagining the villa, outfitting it with 16 pieces from a modular 26-piece grid-based residential system for seating, sleeping and storage, which Paulin conceptualized in the early 1970s for the American furniture manufacturer Herman Miller (the company, ultimately scared off by its scale, never produced it).
ALICE LEMOINE WAS a moody adolescent in 1997 when her parents moved her and her two siblings from an 18th-century house in Bordeaux’s center to a newly constructed Modernist villa designed by the celebrated Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas in a nearby suburb. Too young to appreciate the Brutalist allure of the building, a cantilevered rusted steel box with poured-concrete walls and floors of pale green resin and aluminum, she hated how sound carried between the kids’ upstairs bedrooms. And then there were the passing tour buses, loaded with gawkers trying to catch sight of the architectural masterpiece, which is among the only residential structures that Koolhaas, 75, has ever built.
But her youthful protestations hardly took priority at the time: A couple of years prior, her father, Jean-François Lemoine, a newspaper publisher who had fostered the local contemporary arts scene in Bordeaux, had been in a car accident that left him paraplegic. Koolhaas’s goal was to create a house that was not merely aesthetically outré but also entirely accessible — likely the first Modernist dwelling conceived around a wheelchair. The architect’s central innovation was a 10-foot-square open steel platform that moves hydraulically between the three floors; it was set up as Lemoine’s office, with a custom-made desk by the Belgian furniture designer Maarten van Severen, allowing the publisher to transport himself and his work environment vertically through the 5,400-square-foot hillside mansion. With the push of a button, he could move from the ground-level kitchen and vast Japanese-inflected courtyard to the glassed-in middle floor with views of the city on all sides to the top level containing the bedrooms, their round windows punched through the metal facade like portholes. A three-story bookshelf runs along one side of the house; Lemoine was able to raise and lower the platform to reach any volume at will. “The accident didn’t make my parents more cautious in design,” Alice says. “It made them go even further.”