At Les Arcs from 1967, Perriand did not import modernism to altitude — she remade it for a specific set of constraints.

The Problem the Mountain Posed

When Charlotte Perriand first visited Les Arcs in 1967, the site above Bourg-Saint-Maurice was not yet a resort. It was a slope — steep, subject to serious snow load — and Roger Godino's development company had a programme to build one from scratch under the logic of the Plan Neige, the state-backed 1964 initiative that treated ski infrastructure as industrial policy. Perriand was brought in not as a decorator but as the designer responsible for the interior organisation of the residential units. The brief was severe: maximum skier-beds per square metre of heated volume, direct snow-level access, no wasted corridor, no move that cost weight or money without earning it back.

Perriand had spent the previous three decades in a discipline of exactitude. Her collaborations with Le Corbusier in the 1920s and 1930s had produced the argument — his and hers, contested — that furniture was architecture's interior edge. Her work in Japan in the early 1940s had pushed that further: the tatami module, the built-in element, the object that could not be separated from the room it organised. What Les Arcs required was the same thinking applied to a prefabricated alpine shell.

Built from the lift line outward: a Plan Neige resort starts at its infrastructure.

Photo: Gaetan THURIN / Pexels

The Arc-en-Ciel Units and What They Solved

The residential blocks Perriand designed with architects Jacques Labro and Jean-Marc Roché at Arc 1600 and Arc 1800 from the early 1970s used a curved plan form — the arc-en-ciel (rainbow) configuration — that stepped the building down the fall line of the slope. This was not a formal conceit. It allowed each unit to sit flush with the snow at the rear while maintaining a full glazed facade at the front: skiers entered at roof level from the piste and descended into the apartment, a section that compressed circulation to almost nothing.

Inside those units, Perriand treated every centimetre as load-bearing in a spatial sense. The built-in bunk, the folding table, the banquette that converted to a sleeping surface, the under-stair storage — none of these were fitted furniture in the conventional sense. They were the room. A unit that housed four to six people in roughly 25 to 35 square metres worked because no surface was single-purpose and no element projected further into the space than the function demanded. The kitchen was a galley; the window seat was a bed; the ceiling followed the roof pitch and gave back the volume that the floor plan denied.

The materials were unambiguous about what they were. Timber — pine, local where possible — was left as timber. Lauze tradition in external facing was acknowledged without being imitated. The palette was warm but declarative: nothing was dressed to look like something else. Perriand had written and argued since the 1930s that the honest material was the social material, and Les Arcs gave her a programme where honesty was also simply cheaper.

The scheme earned its place in the documented record of postwar European design. The Centre Pompidou holds work from Perriand's archive ↗ and has exhibited Les Arcs as a coherent built argument rather than a biographical footnote. The resort's built fabric was listed as a site of architectural heritage significance by the French Ministry of Culture — a recognition that the interior organisation was inseparable from the structural form.

What the Work Actually Was

Perriand was in her mid-sixties when Les Arcs began and continued working on the development into the 1980s. The contribution was cumulative: unit layouts were refined across successive phases, and she was specific about the difference between a prototype that worked in a showroom and one that worked under five months of continuous occupation at altitude.

That insistence on occupation is the useful frame. Les Arcs was not a manifesto materialised in concrete. It was a housing problem — dense, cold, seasonal, remote from supply chains — that Perriand solved with the tools she had been sharpening for forty years. The mountain did not compromise the design principles. It clarified them.