PHOTO LAB.

In a house in Paris, the problem of bringing luminance into the centre of a long narrow plan has been elegantly and ingeniously solved by means of a funnel of light.

Designed by Atelier Lab, this compact and elegantly contrived house was built for a client who works in the film industry and is alive to qualities of light and space. The brief asked for two bedrooms, and since the client works partly at home he also required a study.

The house occupies a sliver of land (35m by 4.5m) in the 17th arrondissement. Shouldered in by buildings on either side, it steps up the site, running back southwards from a tiny cul-de-sac to a road.

There are two levels, the upper one projecting front and back over the ground floor. At the front, behind an austere gate, panelled in aluminium, a small courtyard accommodates a car under a garage door; at the back, a garden like an outdoor room is an extension of the living room.

Given his client's occupation, Christophe Lab has elaborated on filmic imagery and references, playing on the idea of the house as a camera obscura in which light travels from one end to the other. To bring luminance down into the centre of the long narrow plan, Lab installed a funnel of light that, painted a soft glowing yellow, reaches down to the ground floor.

Like the ground floor, the first revolves around the central light drum. There are two bedrooms, one at each end of the house, and an open study on the south side. On the north, the bedroom window is pulled back to form a receding bay behind a balcony; on the south, the bay is stretched out but in both cases, when standing outside, you are reminded of a view finder. Downstairs, you eat directly under the central light, as if on an illuminated stage. On one side is the kitchen, next to the stairwell; on the other, the living room flows into the garden through a glass wall and over a wooden terrace.