The Bouafier quarter on the outskirts of Sainte, composed of typical social housing units, appeared in the 1970s. Forty years later, it was renovated in order to improve the quality of the urban environment: in addition to redevelopment and the demolition of several houses, at the intersection of two streets, a plot was allocated for new development. In 2016, a residential complex with 30 apartments appeared there, designed by two bureaus from Bordeaux - Poggi and More. The architects sought to unleash the potential of the site located at the entrance to the area and provide residents with maximum comfort. And the metaphor of clouds was expressed in the form of buildings and their snow-white finish: its variable transparency seems to blur the contours of houses.
Consoles "grown" on the walls maximize the outdoor space and give the apartments the features of individual houses: each has a balcony, loggia or terrace, as well as an external storage room, which provides residents with a convenient place to store things or dry clothes. The overhangs are randomly located on all sides of the houses, which provides a variety of layouts and a uniform appearance of the facades.
The consoles are lined with "checkered" metal grilles that protect from noise and views from the street, ensuring privacy. The lattices of the loggias are translucent, openings are cut in them in the direction of the best view, while visual contact between neighboring apartments is blocked. In outdoor storage rooms, already denser panels with shallow openings are used to hide the often unsightly belongings of the tenants. The set of lattices forms a dissolving shell of the "cloud", for which the walls are lined with profiled metal.
The division of the residential complex into three separate compact volumes made it possible to ensure the permeability of the site, improve natural lighting and ventilation of the apartments. "White Clouds" successfully fit into the environment of standard white buildings, pedestrian paths and driveways. The houses take advantage of the difference in height: two of them have parking on the ground floor, and the landscape seems to envelop the architecture. The total area of the complex was 1886 m2.
