Paris, France, 2026-10-19 - 

Hennessy Village explores a precise and sensitive architecture, where form does not impose itself but rather reveals itself through the dialogue between landscape, uses, and materiality. The project brings forth an essential, discreet, and shared beauty, capable of transcending cultures through its universality.

 

Embodying Hennessy’s Values

Beyond its function, the project conveys a collective vision: working together, being connected to the territory, transmitting, receiving, living, and tasting.

The hybrid program brings together offices, dining, exhibition, and reception spaces within a clear and adaptable organization. It encourages exchanges between professions, including the most sensitive ones such as the craft of the “nez”, in an environment conducive to transmission and creative stimulation.

 

Resonance Between the Vineyard Landscape and the Cognac World

In Salles-d’Angles, the project is rooted in a rolling landscape structured by vineyards. The architecture accompanies the landscape and geometrizes the territory rather than constraining it. Located on a Hennessy bottling ICPE industrial site in immediate proximity to a military air base, the building develops 4,000 m² within a demanding context.

 

Composition from Earth to Sky

The building is organized according to a tripartite composition: base, main body, and attic level.

Its relationship to the ground is singular: the timber building rests lightly upon it, without anchoring, preserving the integrity of the natural soil while affirming its lightness and reversibility. This transitional space combines climatic comfort, circulation, and contemplation.

The main body unfolds through a regular structural grid, rhythmically articulated by a gallery of walkways. The attic level rises toward the sky through the elevation of the canopy, whose underside is tinted a deep red evoking the amber reflections of cognac.

 

Façades: Between the Inner Garden and the Wider Landscape

The landscape penetrates the interior spaces, which extend toward the horizon.

To the south, the project opens onto the terroir and the vineyards. Here, the façade composed of walkways becomes an active thickness: both a collaborative space and a passive solar protection system. To the north, a shared courtyard garden brings together the activities of both buildings, centered around a reflecting pool that fosters a dialogue between architecture and nature.

The walkways create a lived-in gallery that encourages interaction, while the openings frame the landscape and anchor the spaces within their surroundings.

 

The Art of Hospitality: the Entrance Sequence

The approach to the project is conceived as a welcoming sequence, from landscape to architecture, echoing a culture of hospitality intrinsic to the world of cognac.

From the parking area, the pathways converge toward the top of an embankment forming a shared forecourt and leading to a walkway that marks the entrance. From this point of balance, the building unfolds toward the garden below and toward the upper levels in a seamless transition between landscape, ground, and architecture.

Inside, the continuity is reversed: the spaces open first onto the garden and then onto the landscape.

 

Order, Structure, Space, and Light

The prefabricated modular timber structure expresses a poetic rationality, supported by a clear grid of columns and beams.

Through spaces provide fluidity, natural ventilation, and a constant relationship to the landscape – distant to the south, inward-looking to the north.

Circulation spaces, designed as true rooms in themselves, unfold like a hypostyle hall formed by a succession of colonnades. They enhance the timber structure and organize movement through the building, offering deep perspectives and visual openings. Coffee points, alcoves, and shared tables enrich the circulation areas and naturally intertwine uses.

 

Major Spaces et Hennessy’s savoir-faire

The major spaces break free from the governing order to become moments of exception, strategically positioned at the extremities of the system, like episodes in a narrative.

The Place du Village, beneath a double-height ceiling and amber glass, transcends the function of a restaurant to become a place of conviviality. Other spaces embody the identity of the Maison: the Eaux-de-Vie counter welcomes winegrowers, the tasting room privileges confidentiality and concentration, and the dining room combines hospitality and workspace with simplicity and efficiency.

 

Sensory Materiality and Envelope Performance

Wood, neither decorative nor effect-driven, expresses a constructive, sustainable, and sensitive architecture in resonance with viticultural culture. Its grain and rhythms create a living material, both visual and tactile. Acoustic performance transforms the building into a refuge, where silence becomes an essential spatial quality.

Energy performance and certifications reflect a global ambition in which environmental excellence becomes a driver of creation.

 

A Place for Living, Working, and Hospitality

Hennessy Village transcends the elementary character of the so-called “tertiary” building typology. Between intuition and method, sensitivity and rigor, the project asserts an elegant architecture that does not seek to demonstrate, but to reveal.

An architecture that imagines the obvious and touches, quite simply, emotion.