On Monday, November 3, 2025, the Prix AMO 2025 award ceremony took place. This year, the Grand Prix was not chosen from among the winners of each category, but from the 19 projects presented before the jury chaired by architect Philippe Madec (associer). Described as a “sublime project” by the jury, the Château de Beaucastel wine estate, developed by the Perrin family and designed by Studio Méditerranée and Studio Mumbai, demonstrates that a private client can also contribute to the common good. The designers of Beaucastel did more than create a wine estate — they articulated an ethic: a manifesto for long-term thinking, for rediscovered materiality, for unassuming responsibility, and for a renewed relationship with the land, the climate, and the community of work. Clémentine Roland, co–editor-in-chief of AA, presents the project in the publication dedicated to the Prix AMO 2025.

Clémentine Roland, co–editor-in-chief of AA

nder the fierce sun of Courthézon, Château de Beaucastel stands anchored in the red earth and rounded pebbles that define its terroir. Here, where architecture and landscape speak the language of wine, Studio Méditerranée (Louis-Antoine Grégo) and Studio Mumbai (Bijoy Jain) did more than restore a historic estate: they reinvented the relationship between people, material, and time. Winner of the Prix AMO, the project to extend and renovate the Perrin family’s vineyard embodies all the ambitions of the AMO association: the shared creation of a total work, rooted as deeply in its soil as in its era. ‘Sublime,’ declared the jury unanimously, saluting a project capable of reconciling what has long been kept apart: agricultural labour and beauty, technique and memory, production and poetry.

Since 1909, the Perrin family has cultivated one hundred hectares of vines in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Five generations of pioneering organic and biodynamic winegrowers in the Vaucluse have shaped a wine of rare character. When their grandmother, guardian of the estate for eight decades, passed away, the fifth generation of cousins decided it was time for transformation. ‘During my grandmother’s lifetime, we hardly touched Beaucastel beyond the historic cellars,’ recalls Charles Perrin. ‘After her death, despite our grief, we wanted to imagine the next fifty years – and that meant more than a simple whitewash. We had to be revolutionary, just as our grandparents were in the 1950s.’ The family’s ambitions were threefold: to restructure the estate to improve working conditions, to honour its biodynamic philosophy, and to create naturally tempered spaces that balance ecological and economic logic. An architectural competition was launched, attracting some 360 entries. The proposal from Studio Mumbai and Studio Méditerranée immediately stood out. ‘Bijoy, Louis-Antoine and their teams presented their project with great humility. They arrived two days before the competition and spoke to us about terroir, land, and culture. Above all, they told us that our grandmother had been right – that nothing should be changed, only adapted.’ The story of their collaboration began in Tokyo in 2011, when Louis-Antoine Grégo, then working at SANAA on the Louvre-Lens, met Bijoy Jain. ‘I asked Bijoy for advice about travelling to India… and I ended up moving there, working alongside him for nearly four years,’ Grégo recalls. ‘I remember being captivated by a different sense of time – when, deep in the jungle, we moulded and fired our own bricks, testing hundreds of colours and models. I felt that everything was possible, that we only had to build ourselves what no one else would.’ At Beaucastel, that complicity resurfaced naturally. The project unfolded through listening, slowness, and presence. ‘I’ve always seen the Perrin family’s choice to work with us as a kind of tribute to the risks their grandparents took in rejecting the destructive chemical industry of the 1950s,’ says Grégo. ‘It was a leap of faith: Charles didn’t give us a blank cheque for a grand architectural gesture, but by questioning our choices constructively, he helped us realise that our non-academic, minimalist approach was gradually being understood.’

Before drawing a single line, the architects lived on site. They observed the harvest, the gestures, the silences. They understood that Beaucastel was not merely a winery, but a way of inhabiting the world. The construction would last seven years. Of the original 5,500 square metres, 2,000 were dismantled, and 5,000 rebuilt using only materials from the site itself, for at Beaucastel, one builds with the earth that yields the wine. The soil, a layer of rolled pebbles over red clay, was excavated over some 24,000 cubic metres, then sorted and sieved. The clay became rammed earth; the pebbles were transformed into a dry, grainy site concrete. Earth and lime plasters were insulated with linen; paints were made from local clay. Ninety percent of the site’s materials were reused, donated, or sold. Everything else was sourced within a thirty-kilometre radius: stone from Mont Ventoux, parefeuille tiles from the Gard, timber and metal from local suppliers. Perhaps the most poetic innovation lies in the natural ventilation system inspired by Persian badgirs. In this region swept by the Mistral, wind towers capture air from the north, channel it underground above a water tank maintained at 14°C, and then redistribute it through the cellars via cooling floors. These towers serve as both the lungs and buttresses of the rammed-earth walls.

Economy, too, was a matter of restraint. The budget, set at $2,100 per square metre, was respected throughout, proving that one can build with rigour without excess. The site, kept in use throughout the works, never disrupted the activity of the fifty employees. While Bijoy Jain visited the site every three months, he maintained constant dialogue with Louis-Antoine Grégo, who had relocated to Avignon to follow the project closely. The Perrin family attended every site meeting. From this proximity emerged a rare form of collaborative architecture, patiently woven between architects and clients, and enriched through shared journeys – to India, Burgundy, Corsica, and Provence. Everywhere, the same conviction guided them: understand before building. Beaucastel stands as a quiet manifesto for a new constructive humanism: one that builds with what already exists, not against it.