page_title: Villa Cavrois
section_title: Visit of the Villa Cavrois
hierarchical_section_title: Villa Cavrois / Visit of the Villa Cavrois
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Villa Cavrois: il vestibolo Français&#160;: Villa Cavrois: le vestibule avec les boîtes à lumière
context_page_description: Villa Cavrois in Croix is a large modernist mansion built in 1932 by French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for Paul Cavrois, an industrialist from Roubaix active in the textile industry.
context_section_description: The entrance of the estate is situated in the north-west corner of the terrain, displaced in relation to the main facade of the building.  A round driveway enabled the cars to reach the garage, located in the caretaker's lodge, without having to manoeuvre. The villa introduce itself as yellow brick shell and it is the only realisation of Mallet-Stevens to have a similar frame. The French firm Bonzel produced twenty-six moulds of different form in order to make bricks capables to cover the diverse areas of the villa. The source of inspiration of this brick is the town hall of Hilversum, in the Netherlands, realized by the architect Willem Marinus Dudok. If the aesthetic canon of the villa is resolutely modern (large glass windows, flat-roofs, total absence of decoration, purity of lines), its plan is in line with the French tradition of the 17th- and 18-century châteaux: two symmetrical wings (the parents' wing and the children and household staff wing) evolve around the central corp of the villa, constituted by the vestibule and the hall salon. The plan of the villa is designed to facilitate the displacements and to organise the domestic life in a rational way. In the ground floor, the vestibule is a vast room used to distribute the spaces. The black door that opens to the hall-salon is framed by a pair of light boxes which look like those that Mallet-Stevens designed for the set of Marcel L'Herbier's movie  Le Vertige. The hall-salon is a big double-height cubic room with a large glass window overlooking the park. The floor is covered with parquet and the walls are painted green. On the east side is situated the fireplace alcove wrapped in yellow Sienna marble and set up with leather banquettes. Thanks to a sliding door situated on the west side one can reach the parents' dining room, which is characterised by the walls and the floor in green Swedish marble and the black lacquered pear wood furniture. Adjoining to the parents' dining room, the children's dining room is furnished with a table and six chairs in zebrawood (originals). This room has an independent access to the garden thanks to the exterior corkscrew stairs. from the two dining rooms one can gain access to the pantry and the kitchen. This spaces demonstrate the importance of hygiene in the conception of a modern house by Robert Mallet-Stevens as it is shown by  the presence of a metal furniture, easy to clean, the black-and-white chequerboard floor and the walls covered with white tiles bringing additional luminosity. Still in the ground-floor, in the east wing, Paul Cavrois' study, furnished with varnished natural pear wood, give access to the smoking-room, a little circular room calling to mind a cabin of a liner that is provided with a cigar and alcohol cabinet in natural Cuban mahogany and leather bench seats. The east end of the ground-floor is occupied by the two young men's rooms, one with an intense and living polychromy of the walls, a tribute to the Dutch artistic movement De Stijl, and the other one with the walls painted in different shades of yellow and the furniture in black-and-white ceruse oak wood.
  One can reach the first floor by the monumental staircase, built into the belvedere tower, with white marble steps and black marble risers. the west wing is reserved to the children and the governess's rooms while the east wing house the parental suite. In the children's wing, the boys' room has not be restored to show the condition of the villa before the restoration work. In the parents' wing, the master bedroom presents itself with a furniture in palm wood and the walls painted beige, which give it elegance et refinement. The boudoir of Lucie Cavrois looks more casual as a result of the blond tone of the furnitures in sycamore, the walls painted in light blue and the navy blue moquette. The master bathroom is a dual-aspect room of around 60 m². This space is constituted of a part reserved to the dressing, with a black-and-white polka-dot moquette, and a part consecrated to the ablutions (bathtub and shower cabin equipped with water jets) with 
caption: The vestibule with the lights boxes
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "74", "Image Orientation": "0", "Image ImageLength": "4309", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[3, 9, 6]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLongitudeRef": "E", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[50, 40, 1]", "Image GPSInfo": "92", "Image ImageWidth": "3448", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown"}