La Vallee Verte (The Green Valley) by MVRDV is a 70-unit housing project in Bordeaux’s Bastide Niel district, organized as three angular blocks on a triangular site and carved around a densely planted circular courtyard. The project translates the district’s solar geometry into a compact urban form, using terraces, loggias, and layered vegetation to create an interior landscape shared by residents and ground-floor programs.
La Vallee Verte Technical Information
- ArchitectsMVRDV
- Location100 Quai des Queyries, 33100 Bordeaux, France
- Gross Area5,250 m2 | 56,510 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2016 – 2024
- Photographs© Paul Lefevre and Matthieu Lecouvey
With La Vallee Verte we cut the three blocks and added an explosion of greenery, achieving intimacy in another way: the green courtyard is like a secret world, almost separate from the rest of the neighbourhood; being there becomes a moment shared between the visitors and the residents.
– Winy Maas
Urban Form Within the Bastide Niel Masterplan
La Vallee Verte occupies a triangular plot at the northwestern edge of Bastide Niel, where Bordeaux’s right bank shifts from former industrial terrain toward a denser residential quarter. The project is shaped by the rules of the broader masterplan: narrow streets, compact parcels, angled roofs, and volumetric cuts calibrated to preserve solar access. Rather than treating these constraints as a secondary layer of regulation, the design allows them to determine the project’s external profile, producing three sharply sloped blocks that align with the district’s emerging roofscape.
The street-facing elevations are composed as continuous surfaces of pale grey tiles that wrap walls and pitched roofs with limited interruption. This produces a controlled urban exterior, closer to a mineral envelope than a conventional facade. Punched windows, skylights, and photovoltaic panels register as precise insertions in the tiled skin, reinforcing the distinction between the exterior’s disciplined surface and the more articulated interior condition. From the riverfront and aerial viewpoints, the project reads as part of a collective field of angular white volumes rather than as an isolated object.
This urban discipline is set against the site’s geographic and historical complexity. Bastide Niel is built on the traces of railway infrastructure, military occupation, and industrial use, while its proximity to the Garonne River places it within a flood-sensitive landscape. La Vallee Verte addresses these conditions through a compact footprint, porous ground surfaces, and raised residential levels, but its most legible response is spatial: the project presents a firm edge to the street while reserving its sectional and landscape complexity for the interior.
The Courtyard as a Vertical Landscape
At the center of the three blocks, the massing is carved into a circular concave void. This subtraction changes the reading of the project from a group of separate buildings into a continuous spatial system organized around an internal topography. The courtyard is not simply an amenity placed between housing blocks; it is a volumetric cut that reshapes the elevations, terraces, circulation, and views. Its inward focus creates a sheltered environment that differs sharply from the angular exterior streetscape.
The courtyard facades are built from stepped terraces and loggias that rise in tiers from the planted ground plane to the upper floors. Exposed concrete slab edges, slim railings, full-height glazing, and rows of tapered planters form a layered section in which architecture and planting are interdependent. The terraces do not conceal the building’s structure, but they soften its verticality through repeated horizontal bands of vegetation. The result is a three dimensional garden in which the facade operates both as enclosure and cultivated terrain.
The planting strategy relies on variation rather than uniform greening. Grasses, evergreen shrubs, deciduous species, flowering plants, trailing growth, and small trees are distributed across different levels, creating shifts in density, color, and texture through the seasons. This approach gives the courtyard a degree of ecological and visual complexity often absent from planted balconies, where vegetation is treated as a surface treatment. Here, the vertical planting is intended to approximate a valley condition, denser at the base and more fragmented toward the upper terraces.
Housing, Thresholds, and Shared Domestic Space
The project contains 70 apartments of different sizes, allowing the building to accommodate households with varied spatial needs. Ground-floor uses, including a daycare, restaurant, and retail spaces, extend the program beyond private housing and connect the development to the daily life of the district. The daycare benefits from the protected character of the courtyard, where the landscape provides an outdoor environment separated from the street without becoming visually isolated from the residential levels above.
Private loggias mediate between apartments and the shared courtyard. They give each dwelling an outdoor threshold while maintaining a collective spatial identity, since every balcony participates in the larger planted section. From the interiors, full-height openings frame views across the void, making the courtyard part of domestic perception rather than a distant communal space. This arrangement also complicates the boundary between privacy and exposure: residents gain outlook and light, but their terraces remain within a shared visual field.
A maintenance route for gardeners runs through the balcony system, allowing the planting to be sustained over time rather than left to individual residents. Openings in party walls and steel doors between neighboring terraces make this route possible. Their person-shaped silhouettes, topped with the outline of a wide-brimmed hat, turn a technical requirement into a recurring architectural detail. The motif is somewhat literal, but it clarifies an often-hidden issue in planted architecture: landscape performance depends on access, labor, and long-term care.
Environmental Strategy and Material Expression
The project’s environmental logic begins with geometry. The angled roofs and facades follow the Bastide Niel masterplan’s suncut principles, which use volumetric modeling to reduce overshadowing and maintain access to direct sunlight across neighboring buildings. In this sense, the form is not only sculptural or contextual but regulatory and climatic. The roofscape records a negotiation between density, daylight, and the scale of the surrounding urban fabric.
Other environmental measures operate at the scale of systems and ground conditions. The building is connected to district heating, while photovoltaic panels are integrated into the sloped roof surfaces. Permeable paving, planted areas, and porous landscape surfaces support rainwater absorption, a necessary response to the site’s position within the Garonne floodplain. Parking is consolidated in an adjacent above-ground structure, reducing the need for vulnerable basement excavation, while raised ground-floor apartments allow water to pass through during flood events.
Materially, La Vallee Verte depends on a deliberate contrast between exterior restraint and interior texture. The pale tiled envelope reduces heat absorption and gives the street elevations a continuous, almost scaled surface. Inside the courtyard, bush-hammered concrete edges, metal balustrades, timber decking, glazed openings, and dense planting create a more tactile architectural language. This shift is central to the project’s spatial identity: the exterior belongs to the collective rules of the district, while the interior develops a cultivated microclimate shaped by section, maintenance, and seasonal change.
About MVRDV
MVRDV, identified in the project material from Rotterdam, was set up in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs, and Nathalie de Vries. The studio engages globally in providing solutions to contemporary architectural and urban issues through a highly collaborative, research-based design method that involves clients, stakeholders, and experts from a wide range of fields from early in the creative process.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: ECOTECH
- MEP consultants: ECOTECH
- Landscape designers: A+R Paysage (Remi Salles)
- Client: PICHET Promotion
- Construction company: Ramery, Pyrenees Charpentes, Labastere, ATE Alu, Bers33
- Co-architect: ADVENTO, Bordeaux, France
- Project coordination and cost calculation: ECOTECH
- Environmental advisor: ADER ECO
- Founding partner in charge: Winy Maas
- Partner: Bertrand Schippan
- Design team: Antoine Muller, Nicolas Land, Charlotte Kientz, Kamile Malinauskaite, Marie Saladin, Nils Christa, Sylvain Totaro, Mickael Pors, Davide Salamino, Javier Cuenca Solana, Quentin Aubry, Karolina Szostkiewicz, Chiara Cappelluti, Erik Obando, Gabrielle Evain, Sabin Andrei Zapareniuc, Celine Haghbin
- Business development: Jan Knikker
- Photography: Paul Lefevre and Matthieu Lecouvey
