The Delcourt House: the last house by Richard Neutra

Abstract

The only French building by the architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970), Delcourt house, built in Croix near Roubaix, France, is frequently forgotten in publications on his work, and is generally considered to be of little significance in the largely American career of its designer. At the end of the 1960s, Marcel Delcourt (1923-2016), a young Chief Executive Officer at the head of the mail order company Les Trois Suisses, was attracted to the American way of life. As the final work of Richard Neutra, the Delcourt residence is a fragile heritage, the result of complex and fruitful exchanges between Europe and the United States of America (USA), between architects and the client, but also between the customized design of most of the features and the use of sophisticated techniques, products that the interior finish industry was able to supply at the end of the 1960s. The edifice now stands as a repository of domestic architecture techniques.