Pierre and Eugénie Savoye commissioned this country house in Poissy, outside Paris, from Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret in 1928. Completed in 1931, it is the clearest built statement of Le Corbusier's "Five Points of Architecture": pilotis that lift the house off the ground, a free plan, a free facade, long ribbon windows and a roof garden.
A ramp carries visitors from the entrance hall up through the main living floor to a rooftop solarium, so the house is experienced as a walk. Life inside was less ideal: the roof leaked every autumn. The family left in 1940, and wartime occupation badly damaged the house.
The town of Poissy considered demolishing it in 1958, until protests by architects, and by Le Corbusier himself, saved it. In 1965 it became the first modernist building in France listed as a historical monument.
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