On a site that once made weapons, then car parts, and then nothing at all for years, Hérault Arnod Architectures has completed Paysage Habité - Résidence Harmonie, a 92-home building that starts from a simple observation: 80% of French people say they would rather live in a house than in a flat. The project aims to make collective housing more desirable by borrowing qualities usually associated with a house.

Paysage Habité belongs to a broader vision of the city built on soft mobility, social diversity and housing quality. The site occupies a strategic position, at the hinge between the ZAC de l'Arsenal development and the low-rise residential streets on the other side of Rue Voltaire. Handling the boundary between the new development and the existing urban fabric was a central concern: the building's massing is designed to engage with its neighbours, stepping down gradually in height and keeping cast shadows to a minimum.

The building takes the form of a wide ring wrapped around a shared garden. Deliberately shallow, this ring gives every home a dual aspect and quick access to both the inside and the outside, to the street and to the garden. Most apartments offer two distinct views rather than one, and every home has a balcony or terrace.

Each strand of the programme — social rental housing, subsidised home-ownership, and open-market housing — has its own staircase. Apartments are grouped by category, with no overlap between the different programmes, to make management simpler. Yet this division is invisible from the outside: the project reads as a single, unified whole, with social diversity built in rather than expressed through different architectural treatment. From the street, everyone passes through the same large open porch to reach a garden built around a cooling water feature, a pool that collects rainwater from the roofs. A shared community room sits alongside the porch. Glazed onto the street and with its own independent entrance, it acts as an interface between the life of the neighbourhood and that of the building.

It's the details that best tell the story of the project's ambition. Rather than a basement storage unit — the kind few people really like and almost nobody ever fully empties — residents are given a small timber-clad storage box built directly onto their terrace, which doubles as a screen between neighbours. Rather than leaving bikes at street level, the building carries them up to the front door: lifts sized to take prams and bicycles let residents reach their landing, then continue on to covered, secured platforms fitted with charging points for electric bikes. Stacked at each corner of the garden, these platforms disappear behind climbing plants, turning a very practical answer to bike theft into four green columns rising up the building.

At the top, the roofs host planted terraces reserved for residents on the upper floors. Left deliberately wild, these green roofs insulate the building and buffer rainwater for the whole structure.

On the construction side, the project was designed to be economical and high-performing. The building is built in pale, sand-coloured precast concrete, its surface finely ribbed in a chevron pattern designed specifically for this project, echoed even in the metal screens that shield the balconies. Rather than disguising an economical material, the architects made it the very subject of the project: it is these ribs and folds that give the street-facing balconies their sculptural quality, without any recourse to costly finishes.