Professionals discuss the evolving landscape of home design during Maison&Objet, emphasising the importance of mobility, modularity, and sustainability.
Maison&Objet 2025 has once again set the stage for critical reflections on the future of living. In Paris, architects and designers gathered to discuss how housing models can evolve in response to post-pandemic lifestyles, climate urgency, and shifting social aspirations. The panel “Reinventing the Home: Mobility, Modularity, and Sustainability” brought together Isabelle Stanislas and the Ciguë collective with developer Justine Culioli, offering two distinct but complementary visions for modular, sustainable architecture.
The conversation highlighted not only a growing appetite for flexibility and mobility in residential design but also the urgent need to reconsider how homes can mediate between individual comfort, collective living, and ecological resilience. From transportable, Lego-like modules to forest-edge communities, the projects presented explored how architecture can respond to our era’s longing for both freedom and rootedness.
Modular Living and the Desire for Nature
The demand for modular housing has surged in recent years, spurred by rising housing costs, climate pressures, and a collective yearning for connection with the natural world. As Isabelle Stanislas observed:
“Since lockdown, the way we live, the way we think, the way we inhabit our homes has completely changed. And I wanted to find something that could address these issues of climate, society, comfort, and well-being, but well-being with nature.”
This trend goes beyond efficiency: it reflects a cultural shift. Many people are weary of rigid planning rules, endless permit delays, and the inertia of traditional construction models. Lightweight, adaptable, and modular solutions appeal precisely because they offer speed and autonomy.
“I think people are also a little fed up with the system, which is extremely slow and involves tedious building permits, endless delays in building their homes, and purchasing land,” added Stanislas.
At the same time, architects like those in Ciguë have found ways to embed modularity into permanent contexts, ensuring flexibility without sacrificing rootedness. Their project in Barbizon shows how modular principles can be harnessed to sustain biodiversity, encourage community, and redefine suburban expansion. In both cases, modularity is less about downsizing than about reclaiming control of space, of lifestyle, and of one’s relationship to nature.
Isabelle Stanislas and the Made for Now Pavilion
For Isabelle Stanislas, modular housing is not a technical solution but a cultural one. Her Made for Now project draws inspiration from Portuguese fishermen’s cabins, Charlotte Perriand’s constructive experiments, and post-Covid demands for mobility. The result is a highly customisable system of houses conceived not as prefabricated products but as “an alphabet that could be made one’s own.“
Each house is made of five vertical modules — walls, glazed panels, insulating partitions — which can be combined to form homes ranging from 30 m² to 120 m².
“It’s like Lego… there’s a first Lego piece, which is the house itself, that can be duplicated… And then there’s also the interior Lego, since we have kitchen modules, bathroom modules, headboard modules, furniture modules,” explained Stanislas.
Material choices balance lightness and sustainability, from eucalyptus and pine to hemp insulation. Future adaptations may even include buoyant foundations to withstand rising waters. Crucially, each module is designed to fit into a container, making the home transportable:
“The idea is that your house can be stored in a container and moved to the ski slopes, the beach, the mountains—anywhere.”
Unlike tiny houses, these pavilions uphold architectural codes — with full-height windows, structured façades, and refined interiors. A prototype is already in production in Paris, positioning Made for Now as both a research tool and a market-ready response to our time’s need for resilient, portable architecture.
Ciguë & MA: La Lisière at Barbizon
While Stanislas explores mobility, Ciguë and developer Justine Culioli anchor modular thinking in place. Their La Lisière project in Barbizon, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, reimagines suburban living as a shared, ecological community.
“We really wanted to create a new lifestyle, close to Paris for leisure activities, but at the same time in direct contact with the forest,” recalled Culioli.
The program consists of seven high-end wooden houses, averaging 170–190 m², each designed on a shared structural base yet offering full flexibility in layout. Buyers co-designed their homes in workshops with architects, adjusting everything from roof pitch to room distribution. As Sartout noted:
“The idea is that the seven houses have the same basic layout… And at the same time, they all have the possibility of having differences.”
Equally central is the project’s landscape ethos: no fences, no privatised plots, but open forest shared among residents. Communal services like a swimming pool and tool sheds encourage interaction.
“It was also the mayor’s wish… the idea was to have a preserved, shared space without fences, which also has a fairly strong social dimension,” said Culioli.
In this way, La Lisière resists the logic of fragmentation that defines typical suburban expansion. Instead, it densifies an already-inhabited site while protecting its trees and fostering biodiversity. As Sartout concluded, the goal was to reconcile intimacy and openness:
“It’s how we can share the forest while several of us are living in it, all while building houses that offer privacy.”
Together, the two projects reveal modularity’s dual promise: as a vehicle for personal mobility and as a foundation for collective, ecologically responsible living.
