You already know that you can shop on 1stDibs for vintage Eames lounge chairs and limited-edition Hermès bags. But did you know that you could buy a pedigreed house on the website?
The house in questions is one of Ferdinand Fillod’s Tropical Pavilions, prefabricated homes originally designed by the French architect in 1947. This model, offered on 1stDibs by Galerie Clément Cividino, is believed to have been manufactured in 1951.
Prefabs were all the rage during the interwar years. After World War I, there was a huge demand for cheap, easy-to-build housing in Europe, especially France. Fillod had been developing ideas for affordable structures since the 1920s, about 15 years before Jean Prouvé, his highly celebrated contemporary. These structures, composed of sheets of galvanized steel that were relatively simple to transport and assemble, were immensely popular — tens of thousands were purchased around the globe. But time and the elements have cut that number down to nine known to exist today.
This particular Tropical Pavilion was a prototype sent in the 1950s to Marseille, France, where it served as an office space for a telephone company. By 2003, after years of neglect, it was in bad shape and on the verge of being razed. Fortunately, the French Ministry of Culture stepped in, disassembled it and had it transferred to the Marseille National School of Architecture, where it was to be rebuilt and used as a workshop.
Except that didn’t happen. The funding never materialized, so this once-beautiful structure lay in a heap of rusty parts. In 2007, the ministry named the pavilion a cultural heritage site, a designation that confers recognition but no legal protection. By 2013, the Tropical Pavilion (now more like a Tropical Pile) lay in pieces on the grounds of the engineering firm SETEC, which had paid a symbolic one euro for it. At the time, expert dealers in the field were aware the structure existed, they just didn’t know where the heck it was.
Enter Clément Cividino — owner of Galerie Clément Cividino and serial micro-architecture restorer. In 2017, he was wandering around the grounds at SETEC, whose headquarters included an intact prefab by Jean Prouvé he was interested in, when he spied a pile of metal, half-buried in vegetation. He thought at first he had stumbled upon the bones of a different Prouvé prefab. He had instead found the poor, neglected Tropical Pavilion. He acquired it and got to work on its reconstruction.
Thirty percent of the structure had disappeared or was unsalvageable. But that wasn’t a big deal — Cividino shortened the length of the building, hired an ironworker to re-create the missing floor and a brought on a team of technicians with tiny hammers to tap out the dents in the surviving parts. He could’ve gone crazy with the restoration, as this structure is not actually protected by French law, but he chose to work with the ministry to bring Fillod’s design and vision back to life.
The original Tropical Pavilion was butter yellow (Fillod was again ahead of his time!), save for a green door frame. Cividino and the Ministry decided to extend the green accents on their model throughout, highlighting the structure’s arches and details.
Fillod’s design includes a unique double roof, with a parapet suspended above an inner roof, the gap between the two allowing for natural airflow and cooling. Cividino and the ministry added a glass wall with a rotating door at the back of the structure. Imagine lounging out there with a glass of wine and a good book — true bliss!
The Tropical Pavilion was on view from June to September of last year at Terra Remota, a vineyard-slash-architecture museum in Girona, Spain, that offers a cultural program in partnership with Galerie Clément Cividino. Now, it is ready for its next chapter. The pavilion could be a guest house, a home office, a studio, a place to gather with family and friends — possibilities abound. It just needs a new owner with a vision.
