Dreux

The Dreux Sanatorium has not been abandoned for decades. It waits.

The difference between yesterday and today is neither the setting nor really the reasons for the stay: being cared for already conjures up the idea of ​​care and therefore of well-being. It is even less the architecture. She was there before us.

The difference is time. From now on, we will no longer live here. We will stay there. It is necessary to adapt to short stays an architecture made to accommodate for months, even years.

From the outside, if the forest has conquered the site up to the roofs, the architecture has not changed, and it presents itself to the visitor by the letters of its pediments.

Inside, the distribution, ornaments and lighting are the same and are not intended to change. They can just as much serve the new life of these spaces emptied by time. They have lost their warmth, their objects, their plural soul breathed in as much by nature as by those who have passed between these walls.

The time has come to wake up the scene.

The Sanatorium is patient. Its spaces are waiting to be warmed up and highlighted to match the exteriors and their moldings. Its uses are not reviewed but revisited and modernized, preferring the gentleness of an evolution to the harshness of a clean slate: treatments with the spa, stays offered by the hotel, but also a great place left to culture with an artists’ residence and a center for creation and exhibition.