Residential
We are Atelier Roux — an architecture and interior studio working between Antwerp and Oslo. We build for the long hours: the quiet morning at the window, the long table at dusk, the room you keep coming back to without quite knowing why.
A building is a kind of argument about how to live. We try to argue softly, and at length. We choose materials that improve as they age, rooms that resist their first interpretation, and details that reward a second look — five years later, ten years later, in a different light. — Léa Roux, on the studio's tenth year
A long, low art pavilion cantilevered ten metres over the tidal mouth of the Westerschelde. Fritted glass casts striped shadow on the water at low tide; at high tide the building becomes a horizon line of warm light. The brief was for an art space; we delivered a clock.
Every commission begins with a long walk on the site, and ends with a printed monograph. In between, five stages — each given the time it needs, never less.
We work from a small, deliberate library of materials chosen for how they wear, weather, and reward the touch of a hand. We refuse anything that depends on being new to look good.
Atelier Roux was founded in 2007 by Léa Roux after fourteen years working between Peter Zumthor in Haldenstein and Vincent Van Duysen in Antwerp. The studio has stayed deliberately small: fourteen architects, two model-makers, one librarian. We refuse more than four commissions in any year.
We design buildings, interiors, exhibitions, and furniture — but our deepest interest is in the long, ordinary life of a finished room. We return to every project annually for the first five years, with a camera and a notebook. The work continues after the keys are handed over.
We teach. We publish. We rest in August.
We do not enter many competitions. We are quietly proud of these — particularly the ones decided by people who walked the buildings before voting.
| 2025 |
Mies van der Rohe Award · Nomination
European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture — Horizon Pavilion
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Horizon Pavilion |
| 2025 |
Wallpaper* Design Award — Best Public Building
For sensitivity of light and material to programme
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Horizon Pavilion |
| 2024 |
RIBA International — Award Recipient
Royal Institute of British Architects, residential category
|
Fjord House |
| 2024 |
Dezeen Awards — Architect of the Year, shortlist
For sustained, distinctive practice over the decade
|
Studio body of work |
| 2023 |
Belgian Building Awards — Gold, hospitality
For Keswick Retreat, completed in late 2023
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Keswick Retreat |
| 2022 |
AJ100 — Emerging Practice of the Year
Architects' Journal, judged by a panel including David Chipperfield
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Studio body of work |
| 2021 |
Architectural Review — House Prize
For the cantilevered Fjord House, Aurland
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Fjord House |
| 2019 |
ARC Awards — Best Use of Light
For the lime-rendered Atelier Blanc, Ghent
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Atelier Blanc |
Concrete sets in days, glass is cut in hours, and a window full of north light takes the entire life of a building to finish. Some thoughts after twelve years on the same wall.
We sent four of the studio to Tuscany to spend a week at the kilns. They came back with two crates of broken samples and a different idea of what "finish" means.
Léa's keynote on why every good building has at least one moment where the architect quietly refused to do what was asked, and what that moment costs and earns.