An agricultural shed in the countryside is almost invisible. This shed, designed by gens in Ancy-Dornot, is set parallel to the contour lines and perpendicular to the rows of vines.

The lower floor can be semi-buried in the natural slope, reducing its visual impact, allowing the harvest to enter on the upper level and the bottles to leave on the lower one, in a simple gravity process.

It also allows the vinery to be located in the lower part, partially buried, and thus to benefit from great thermal stability, that of a cellar.

The variety of the programme (winery, storage for agricultural equipment, tasting room, the family house of the winemaker, guest rooms) is housed in a single building, the agricultural shed.

The project’s first and foremost desire is to mix everything: work and daily life, customers, guests, friends, children, grape pickers...

Due to its positioning parallel to the level curves, the volume of 50 meters in length and about 4 in height bars the land, cutting it in two: the vines, the forest and the west upstream, the large landscape of the Moselle valley and the east downstream.

The continuity of the place between hillsides and valley is however restored inside. Two voids appear at both ends: the living room of the house and the tasting room, suspended in the countryside.

“Traditional” techniques were used: block work and cast-in-place concrete, metal framework, wooden framework.

The vinery is made of concrete (resistance to humidity, earth pressure, machines and tanks, thermal inertia), the agricultural shed is a metal frame (economy and constructive rationality, robustness, large openings, absence of thermal need), the living areas are a simple well-insulated wooden frame box placed on metal piles.

Still, these different structures disappear behind the unitary skin of corrugated fiber cement, that of the shed and its discreet, banal, conventional and shared presence.

For gens, the experimentation here is more about bringing together diverse people and practices, and the architecture supports that: under one roof, in the same cheerful shed. The both naive and cunning shed aims and achieves an quasi-invisibility, sly beauty.