The redevelopment project of the former École Normale d’Institutrices into a Hyatt Place hotel in Rouen is part of a broader approach to enhancing the site’s landscape and heritage value. Located on elevated ground overlooking the city, the site benefits from a pronounced topography, used as a key design driver to reveal long-distance views and organize a series of stepped pathways. The landscape thus becomes a structuring element of the site experience, offering a gradual reading between city, architecture, and nature.
The outdoor spaces are organized around a system of planted terraces, ramps, and belvederes, ensuring smooth continuity between the different levels. These landscape features support movement, create moments of pause, and extend the architecture into the exterior spaces. Circulation routes are designed as sensory sequences, alternating between open views and more intimate atmospheres, closely connected to the existing topography.
The landscape concept is based on a contemporary vegetated framework that envelops the rehabilitated buildings and reinforces their integration within the site. The planting palette, restrained and adapted to the local context, combines shade trees, shrub layers, and perennial plantings to create natural, evolving atmospheres. Particular attention is given to stormwater management, integrated into the project through landscaped swales and permeable surfaces that contribute to the site’s ecological quality.
The outdoor spaces are conceived as true extensions of the hotel’s uses, accommodating restaurant terraces, relaxation gardens, and calm walking areas. Vegetation supports these uses, softens the relationship between heritage structures and contemporary architecture, and re-establishes a harmonious dialogue between the buildings, the city, and the landscape. The project thus affirms an architecture–landscape approach, in which planting becomes both a compositional material and a vector of identity for this emblematic site in Rouen.
Data
Landscape architecture: Espace Libre
Architecture office involved: CBA ARCHITECTES
Other members of the project:
D+B INTERIOR DESIGN — Interior architect (hotel)
SOGETI INGENIERIE — Cost consultant, MEP engineering (mechanical, plumbing & electrical)
KUBE STRUCTURE — Structural engineering consultant
ACOUSTIBEL — Acoustic engineering consultant
ATELIER LA SUPERBE — Interior architect (offices)
Photo credits: ©JulienFalsimagne / ©Celestedrone (Drone photograph)
Year completed: 2024
