Suspended Serenity: The Perchée Residence

There is a primal appeal to the treehouse that never really leaves us. As children, it represents a secret fortress; as adults, it evolves into a desire for perspective, a need to rise above the noise of the daily grind and find solace in the canopy.

This longing for elevation and immersion is perfectly captured by the Perchée Residence, a stunning architectural project by the French-speaking studio Matière Première Architecture. Set on a maple-wooded site that slopes gently toward a valley where a river traces its course, this home is a masterclass in restraint.

It is a structure that refuses to dominate its environment, choosing instead to tread lightly, preserving the land’s most valuable quality: the feeling of being truly lost among the trees.

The name itself, “Perchée,” is a French term meaning “perched” or “elevated,” and it serves as the guiding principle for the entire design. It refers not only to the house’s suspended relationship to the sloping terrain but also to the architects’ cultural roots. In a world where English is often the default language of design, retaining the French name was a deliberate choice—a way of maintaining a direct connection to language, place, and origin.

But you don’t need to speak the language to understand the intent; the architecture translates the concept fluently. Rather than reshaping the topography with heavy machinery, the home suspends itself within it.

Extended floors and roof planes operate as precise instruments, framing views and carving out a carefully measured clearing that feels less like a construction site and more like a natural opening in the woods.

One of the most compelling aspects of the Perchée Residence is how it redefines the boundary between inside and out. In contemporary architecture, this often just means big windows. Here, it means genuine spatial continuity.

Covered outdoor spaces occupy nearly the same footprint as the interior living areas, creating a gradient of shelter. You don’t simply step “outside”; you shift from a tempered room to a naturally ventilated one, protected by generous overhangs that keep you in constant dialogue with the understory.

This logic even extends to the car storage. Rather than a dark, conventional garage, the space is conceived as a covered volume in reserve—an outdoor room awaiting use.

When the car is absent, the architecture remains, transforming the shelter into a terrace, a threshold, or a flexible living space. It reinforces the idea of a house that multiplies inhabitable places rather than just enclosing square footage.

The structural strategy is equally thoughtful. A longitudinal cantilever plays a central role, allowing the house to float along the slope. This isn’t just an aesthetic flex; it reduces excavation and protects the delicate root systems of the mature trees that define the site.

This projection generates a peripheral walkway and, at garden level, creates an eight-foot-deep sheltered zone facing the pool—an intermediate space where the landscape is quite literally inhabited. Inside, the sense of generosity comes from perceptual precision rather than vast square footage.

Ten-foot ceilings and a thirty-inch clerestory band detach partitions from the roof plane, allowing light and sightlines to flow freely, making the home feel expansive and airy.

Materiality is where the project truly grounds itself. The palette is restrained yet highly specific. Inside, select spruce sourced from Northern Quebec forests establishes a warm, golden glow.

Outside, the materials are deployed by role: red cedar expresses itself in the larger structural elements, while white cedar—treated with a weathering accelerator—wraps the building envelope. This allows the home to develop a rapid, silver-grey patina, helping it recede visually into the forest over time.

Custom millwork and interior components oscillate between solidity and delicacy, asserting a vocabulary where wood remains dominant without ever weighing the space down. The Perchée Residence is a quiet observatory of the forest, a house that finds its equilibrium not by correcting the slope, but by inhabiting it with grace.

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