The Château Cantenac Brown | (apm) architecture & associés

A Scottish castle in Margaux

Cantenac Brown, a 1855 classified grand cru, is located in Margaux, France, near Bordeaux. The emblem of this winery is its spectacular Tudor-style château built by a Scotsman, John Lewis Brown, 200 years ago and unique in this region. Upon his family's acquisition of Château Cantenac Brown in 2019, Tristan Le Lous became the custodian of this heritage, vowing to safeguard the property's high standards and quality. In 2020, the architect Philippe Madec, a leading architect and pioneer in eco-construction, was chosen to design a cellar built from raw earth and untreated solid wood, pushing the boundaries on current environmentally responsible practices.

Architectural Position
The project aimed for an energy-efficient renovation: working with what was already there, without disturbing the site or competing with the Tudor château. The restructuring completes the volumes of the southern part of the domain, comprised of a hotel built by Axa in the 1990s and former dependencies dating from earlier times. 

A wine harvest hall houses the work and welcomes visitors under a massive moulded wooden frame, painted red (flour paint). A vaulted port-cochere opens onto the vat-hall, a vast two-level space dedicated to an entirely gravity flow vinification process. Natural light is present across the entire depth of the space thanks to a careful design of folds and edges of the roof, accessible by running along the rammed earth wall, and the shaded place where the wine is slowly aged in wooden barrels. The high vault made of solid moulded wood rests on steel compasses.

The architectural project is a model of eco-responsible construction. The walls of the cellar, built entirely of one-metre thick raw earth, provide optimal thermal inertia. Earth is also the only construction material that naturally regulates ambient humidity. The power of the earth thus offers the perfect atmosphere, in terms of temperature and humidity levels, for the stability and ageing of the wines in barrels without requiring energy consumption.
This project for a bioclimatic and energy-efficient cellar also participates in the development of the biosourced and geo-sourced materials sectors: solid wood, stone, and raw earth.

Social eco-responsibility
This project fully answers all the commitments to greater environmental responsibility based on three pillars: the economy, the environment, and society. Cantenac Brown has bestowed itself the largest harvest hall ever built in the Bordeaux region. This covered area, at the heart of the new construction, is strategically placed between the vat room and cellar and protects the grape pickers from the ever-hotter summer temperatures. The vat house, the space for everyday work, is bathed in natural light and broadly open onto the park of the domain. Peripheral insulation, of exceptionally high quality, offers stable comfort to daily users in both winter and summer without heating or air-conditioning. Finally, the vat house and the room are positioned on the ground floor following a compact plan, simplifying as much as possible the workflow and the path followed by the grapes.

Photography: Luc Boegly

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