Maison Weissenburger: Seaweed at the Door, Crabs on the Ceiling

The others are his clients. He oversaw the construction of Louis Majorelle’s villa, then designed the factory and house of the printer Bergeret. In 1903 he opened one more site: his own. The building was finished in 1905.

His house holds a corner. It is built of pale limestone: one story, then a slate attic where paler courses trace a zigzag. The balconies are iron painted white. From the smallest one rises a stone chimney, thin as a stem, that climbs well above the roof.

The sea begins at the entrance. Seaweed runs around the window openings, over the door and along the low terrace wall on the street side. The grille is white too: its rods rise in a bundle, fan out and fall back in front of dark glass. The ironwork and the furnishings of the house come from Majorelle’s firm, which also supplied the design of the ceramic frieze on the terrace.

The roof, though, stays in Lorraine. The dormer windows curve beneath stone hoods. The large attic window is divided by one mullion and two transoms. On the neighboring street, the stone of an attic window forms a Cross of Lorraine.

The crabs are inside. They fill the ceiling of the dining rooms. On the second floor, one bedroom has a fireplace made by the Produits céramiques de Rambervillers, in the Vosges, from a design by Eugène Vallin. Jacques Gruber made the stained-glass windows. The masonry staircase winds around an open well, and its banister starts from a geometric ornament.

The architect also had a garden. Garages took part of it, opened into the boundary wall. The façades, the roofs and Gruber’s glass partitions have been classified since 1996. The building is a private co-ownership: from the street, you can see the seaweed, not the crabs.