Stay in Jean Prouvé’s 6x6 demountable house at Fondation CAB in south-east France

Having trained in Nancy within a milieu of metalworking, Jean Prouvé preferred the title constructeur, which accounts for the name of Fondation CAB’s exhibition: not Jean Prouvé, architecte, but inventeur de maisons (‘Jean Prouvé, Inventor of Houses’ runs until 31 October 2026)

Designed in 1944, the 6x6 demountable house belongs to the first phase of France’s reconstruction, when bomb damage across Lorraine and Alsace left hundreds of thousands without shelter and the newly established Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism began commissioning housing that could be produced quickly and in volume. Prouvé’s answer was a house that could be brought in parts and raised by hand, without disturbing the ground more than necessary.

Jean Prouvé at Fondation CAB

At Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation CAB occupies a midcentury building, a Mediterranean modernist villa. Its programme brings together minimal and conceptual art with 20th-century design – and it has a Jean Prouvé 6x6 house in the garden; the exhibition, organised with Laffanour Galerie Downtown, positions the 6x6 demountable house as part of a longer sequence of making and construction.

Inside, a chronological wall sets out Prouvé’s work with the clarity of a workshop record: forged iron doors for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs; entrance grilles produced for Robert Mallet-Stevens; the founding of the Ateliers Jean Prouvé in Nancy in 1931; the Maison du Peuple in Clichy (1935), where folded steel sheet becomes structural; wartime barracks and the axial frames developed for SCAL in Issoire (1940); the aluminium structures of the Maison Tropicale (1949), with a double roof and brise-soleil regulating air before it enters the interior; and, later, the modular petrol stations developed for Total (1969-70).

Prouvé’s 6x6 demountable solution for emergency shelter reduced the house to a frame and a set of panels, dimensioned for easy transport and assembly; it could be put up in a day by three people, or four if you wanted to move quickly. Prouvé furnished his houses as carefully as he made them, not as an afterthought but to suggest how a life might be enjoyed inside them; his father, Victor Prouvé, belonged to the École de Nancy, and functional things, in his view, still had to please the eye.

Hubert Bonnet, founder of Fondation CAB (whose programme extends into Les Maisons CAB as a set of houses and rooms available for stays), describes the attraction: 'What first struck me about him was this rare ability to reconcile constructive rigour with formal clarity. In Prouvé’s work, the structure never hides; it becomes the very language of the object or the architecture. That honesty, almost radical, spoke to me immediately.'

A second Prouvé house from 1958 is being prepared for installation at Clos Saint-François in Saint-Paul de Vence, a property that includes a 19th-century farmhouse formerly owned by the family behind La Colombe d’Or and is now part of Les Maisons CAB’s network of places to stay. The house is the first prototype in a series developed with Claude Prouvé between 1958 and 1962, with the Maison Gauthier among its later examples.

Bonnet describes that continuity in terms close to Prouvé’s own: 'Over time, that attraction became a conviction. His approach –at once industrial, functional, and deeply human – resonates strongly with the way I conceive places. It is not simply about design, but about a way of thinking through use, durability and precision.'

'Within the houses we present today through Fondation CAB, this influence is present in a natural way. Not as a fixed reference, but as a spirit,' he concludes. That spirit has less to do with homage than with taking art and design out from behind glass, widening its company.

More than 70 years after the 6x6 house was first assembled, the force of Prouvé’s work still speaks to a desire for self-reliance, especially at a moment when so much of daily life is engineered and outsourced for ease and low resistance. Bonnet’s wager feels unexpectedly exact: that people still want contact with things that ask something of them, and forms of hospitality that return art and design to the grain of ordinary life.

What Les Maisons CAB offers, in that sense, is not fantasy but re-entry; a chance to sleep, sit and eat among works meant for lived experience. In Saint-Paul-de-Vence, that promise runs from the Prouvé house in the garden to Charles Zana’s guest rooms and the restaurant, into Charlotte Perriand’s furniture.