A ruin brought back to life, dedicated to the painter of the medina.
Project Statement
The villa stood in a state of abandonment. The intervention began with an in-depth study of the foundations, the load-bearing structure and everything that follows from it — a necessary condition for every subsequent choice. Only after securing the building's structural integrity was it possible to proceed with reconstruction, renovation and, finally, the artistic work.
The result is not a simple restoration, but a unified project in which architecture, conservative restoration and pictorial language converge. The works of Néjib Belkhodja — his geometry of the medina, his blues, his ochres — become the chromatic and narrative key to the entire house, transformed into a continuous journey dedicated to the artist.
In the living room, a large top-quality wallcovering, drawn from the artist's works, reconstructs the geometric skyline of the medina: domes, arches and volumes in green, purple, coral and gold, conversing with the deep blue of the sky.
The wall covering is not applied decoration but a narrative surface: it amplifies the depth of the room and dictates its palette. The aubergine velvet sofa, the brass tea table and the traditional rug carry the story forward, balanced between Tunisian heritage and modernity.
In the sleeping area, the wallcovering declines the same vocabulary in earth tones: browns, ochres, ultramarine and azure blues composing an abstract city behind the bed, like a great signed canvas.
The white walls, the exposed beams and the walnut elements let the composition breathe. The arched window with its moucharabieh screen and the pierced-metal lanterns carry the light and the detail of local craft into the space.
Alongside the reconstruction, an essential part of the work was genuine restoration. Beneath the layers of debris, the historic geometric-pattern cement-tile flooring re-emerged, salvaged, consolidated and reintegrated wherever possible.
The same approach guided the treatment of the building's antique elements — thresholds, marbles, decorative details — preserved as testimony to the villa's history and placed in dialogue with contemporary insertions. Nothing authentic was erased: the new is born from respect for the existing.
“We did not decorate a house with paintings: we transformed the house itself into a work by Belkhodja.”
The villa was also decorated on the outside. After the study of the foundations, the structure and everything concerning them, the white domed volumes — the language of Mediterranean and Maghrebi architecture — became the support for a mural echoing the chromatic skyline of Belkhodja's medina.
On the facade facing the water, bands of colour — blue, orange, green, gold — bring the artist's signature out of the limewashed white, tying the building to the landscape and announcing, from the outside, what the house holds within.
1933 – 2007 · Tunis
Born and raised in the medina of Tunis, Néjib Belkhodja absorbed its colours, forms and rhythms from childhood. After training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and periods in Rome and Paris — where he grew passionate about the abstract painting of Delaunay and Kandinsky — he developed an unmistakable language.
Among the founders of the «Groupe des Six», which renewed the Tunisian art scene of the 1960s, he wove Arabic calligraphy together with the graphic language of the medina: arches, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines suggesting the pathways and architecture of the city. It is from this grammar — made of domes, alleyways and geometries — that the works from which the villa's wallcoverings are drawn were born.
A ruin.
An artist. A house.
When restoration meets the work of art, architecture becomes storytelling.
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