In the village of Chamoson, Canton of Valais, LVPH Architectes transforms a shepherd's mayen, inserting a spruce-plywood interior and a wide panoramic window into the rough stone shell against the Alpine skyline.
A mayen is not a farmhouse. It is a seasonal hut, built from the stone of the mountain it sits on, used for summer grazing and abandoned for winter. In Chamoson, at a bend on a snow-covered road in the Valais Alps, LVPH Architectes found one in need of transformation and used it to ask a particular question: how much can you change a vernacular building without replacing it?
The exterior answer is visible immediately. The rough dry-stone masonry is intact, the snow-shedding pitch unchanged. What has changed is a single aperture: a wide horizontal window opening cut into the gable wall at living-room height, framed in pale timber, proportioned like a widescreen view. Through it, the sitting room captures the village rooftops and the ridgeline of the alpine limestone above. The window is not modest, but it reads as a single considered cut rather than a redesign of the face.
Inside, the original stone is gone from the visible surfaces. The intervention is a spruce plywood envelope: walls, ceiling, shelving, bedroom partition all in the same pale knotted timber. Where the mayen offered rough masonry, the new interior offers a consistent, smooth, low-sheen wood surface that collects diffuse light from the horizontal window and from a smaller opening above. The junction between stone shell and timber insert is clean: one world stops, the other begins.
The kitchen retains some vernacular layering: a floral-painted traditional hutch cabinet survives beside new plywood joinery. It reads neither as heritage curation nor as irony but simply as retention of what was usable. A concrete terrace wall at the rear anchors the house to a garden with the mountain face behind it, the transition between old stone and board-formed concrete forming the only material conversation on the exterior.
LVPH Architectes, based in Lausanne, works consistently across domestic renovation and new construction in the Swiss landscape. The Chamoson mayen is one of their smaller projects and one of their clearest: the argument is made with a few decisions, and the photographs by Joël Tettamanti are allowed to carry the weight of the Valais winter around it.
