French architect and interior designer Valérie Chomarat has envisioned a Japanese-inspired holiday home for her family that is just as spectacular as its surroundings.Over the past 25 years, Chomarat has designed palatial homes and swashbuckling yachts for her clients, but this home in South of France was the first time she was creating something for her family that went beyond decoration. From start to finish, this project took her almost four years to complete.

At her holiday home in South of France, Chomarat has created intimate volumes, such as this terracotta-hued terrace, that beautifully frame exterior views and offer respite from heat and light.The horizon became both a backdrop and the main protagonist of the home, with the designer composing a sublime architectural language of elongated openings and stretched volumes.Clad in local limestone, the house blends into Bandol’s sun-kissed terrain, allowing nature to take centrestage.

Inspired by the architect Tadao Ando’s mastery of framing landscapes with the built environment and the beauty of the nearby Ardèche forest, Chomarat has created a subtly layered scheme in which the house’s interior and outside world enrich one another.By keeping the walls, floor and the ceiling in the same colour and deploying just one stone – limestone, which is abundant in the region, and exploring it in all is beauty, from rough and honed, to polished – Chomarat dialled into the strength of simplicity and singularity. 

As a result, the house artfully blends into its surroundings. Ochre exterior walls, the earthy hues of the masonry benches and the tobacco-hued tiles ground it in its locality, while creating a womb-like cosiness.From bed linen in earthy tones to the ancient trees that seem within grasp from the balcony, there is an unbroken connection to nature in the bedrooms.