Henry Jacques Le Même
1897 – 1997
Considered one of the inventors of modern Alpine architecture, Henry Jacques Le Même (1897–1997) settled in Megève in 1925, after spending two years in the Paris studio of Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann.
His first chalet, designed for Baroness Noémie de Rothschild, set the tone for a new aesthetic that combined Savoyard tradition with modern comfort. Sheltered beneath vast roofs, his chalets capture the light. Their simplicity is highlighted by touches of vivid colour on shutters, windows, doors, and the ends of wooden beams. Inside, spacious living rooms open onto the valley and extend into enveloping balconies.
For his own house, built between 1920 and 1930, Henry Jacques Le Même broke his own rules, introducing a roof terrace and red ochre façades. This building, which reveals a creative tension born from the desire to innovate in the face of the mountain’s immutable power, was paradoxically perceived less as a manifesto of modernity than as an exotic note among the forest of chalets — much like a Chinese pagoda or Moorish casino would once punctuate the uniformity of a 19th-century neighbourhood.
Architectures de Henry Jacques Le Même, Institut Français d’Architecture, Éditions Norma, 1999.
