PG House is a minimalist coastal residence located on the French shoreline, designed by KERSTENS. The project’s central problem was a common one in coastal renovation: a holiday house built for subdivision rather than sensation. Smaller rooms, a higher bedroom count, and compartmentalized circulation had severed the interior from the water that defined the site. Andy Kerstens, founder of the Antwerp-based studio, reorganized the ground floor as a single breathing sequence, aligning sightlines from the entrance through to the horizon and maximizing every opening within the protected planning envelope. The sea stops being a view from a window and becomes a condition of the interior atmosphere.
On the first floor, sloped ceilings were opened to expose the original structure, recovering height and spatial ease beneath the pitched roof. The master suite expands into a composed series of spaces – a private passage and en suite bathroom that read as a quiet internal landscape, generous in volume and restrained in finish. The floating blackened steel stair captures the project’s structural logic precisely: wenge treads locked into a hovering frame, the whole construction open enough for light and views to pass through while still reading as a grounded architectural object. It is the difference between a stair as object and a stair as event.
Material continuity does the work that walls used to do. Sandblasted Muschelkalk limestone – a German shell-bearing sedimentary stone with a fine, matte grain that recalls bleached coastal rock – runs across floors and key wall planes, its tonality echoing the shoreline without replicating it. Brushed French oak introduces warmth; wenge adds weight at junctions where the composition needs anchoring. These surfaces carry across thresholds and door reveals so that transitions read as gradual shifts rather than abrupt cuts. The result is a legible interior topography where stone and timber mark routes, pauses, and changes in intimacy rather than simply covering surfaces.
Blackened steel appears as a precise counterpoint throughout. Fluted profiles at selected points register touch as much as sight – an edge inviting the hand to trace it. This attention to tactile register connects KERSTENS to a strand of Belgian interior practice, associated with designers like Axel Vervoordt, that treats material experience as inseparable from spatial atmosphere. Rattan introduces natural fiber at a finer scale, reinforcing the craft logic and grounding the palette in its coastal context without resorting to the decorative shorthand of beach-house cliche.
