Ronan Bouroullec creates pared-back furnishings for Seventeenth-century chapel in Brittany

Following the wildfires that ravaged Brittany’s Arrée mountains final summer season, French designer Ronan Bouroullec has reimagined the inside of the area’s historic Chapelle Saint-Michel de Brasparts as a part of a full restoration.

Initially constructed on the finish of the Seventeenth century, the chapel is a modest constructing with out lighting or electrical energy, perched on high of a outstanding hill that rises above the encompassing moorland.

Breton businessman François Pinault, founding father of luxurious group Kering, financed the chapel’s restoration after it was broken throughout the wildfires, patching up its metre-thick stone partitions, rammed-earth flooring and the uncovered oak body supporting the slate roof.

Bouroullec, who was born and raised in Brittany, remembers the chapel from his childhood and was compelled to design a brand new altar and a number of other furnishings for the constructing as a part of the refurbishment.

Working in collaboration with native artisans, he used a trinity of roughly-hewn supplies – granite, metal and glass – that will stand the check of time whereas reflecting the constructing’s rugged rural location.

“Heavy sufficient to not be moved, sturdy sufficient to not be broken, tough sufficient to not require cleansing, the weather that Ronan Bouroullec has positioned within the chapel should succeed, regardless of or due to these traits, in making a sensory expertise,” wrote Martin Bethenod, former CEO of Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce museum, in an introductory textual content for the venture.

“The bush-hammered granite, blurred glass, hammered metal, the selection of a galvanized end to melt the distinction of the cross and candlesticks with the whiteness of the lime-rendered partitions – every intervention combines sensations of roughness and softness, of pressure and tremor.”

Nuit celtique de Huelgoat granite – quarried lower than 15 kilometres away from the chapel – was lower into three items earlier than being labored by native stone mason Christophe Chini to create an altarpiece, its horizontal base and a console desk for candles and choices.

Bethenod compares the darkish stone, studded with shards of white, to “the starry evening sky over the chapel, nearly devoid of sunshine air pollution”.

The steel components – a easy cross and a gaggle of three tall candle holders, all in hammered metal – had been the results of one other collaboration, this time between Bouroullec and Roscoff-based metalworker Mathieu Cabioch.

Among the candles stand straight on the altar whereas the remaining are built-in into the Brutalist console desk, which consists of an extended slab of granite, seemingly supported by a number of of the metal candle holders.

The ultimate ingredient in Bouroullec’s materials trinity is glass, within the type of a big mirrored disc that hangs centrally behind the altar.

Made by glassmakers from the Venice space, with whom Bouroullec has labored for a number of years, the piece was designed to create a dialogue with the 2 stained-glass home windows within the apse, that are the chapel’s solely surviving ornamental ingredient.

“Greater than a mirror, greater than an object, it’s a mild supply with out bodily substance, as if a spherical gap had been made within the wall to disclose daylight, unpredictable and consistently altering,” mentioned Bethenod.

Brittany is dwelling to a few of the world’s oldest standing structure. Different initiatives making use of the area’s historic buildings embody this conversion of a Seventeenth-century barn right into a printmaker’s studio.

The primary new church to be in-built Brittany within the twenty first century was accomplished by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira in 2018, that includes a sculptural composition of intersecting concrete kinds.

The pictures is by Claire Lavabre courtesy of Studio Bouroullec.