Villa Arson is a contemporary art center and an art school in Nice (South of France). Its Brutalist architecture, designed by Michel Marot in the 1960s, encircles an 18th-century red villa with a labyrinth of concrete structures, gardens, patios, and terraces overlooking the mediterranean sea.
The visual identity reflects the diversity of Villa Arson’s missions and activities through the values of hospitality and inclusivity. The spatial arrangement of the words villa, arson, and nice creates an open structure, ready to welcome collaborators and unfold content.
Used exclusively in lowercase, the typeface embodies the institution’s history and its past visual identities, while expressing discretion and simplicity. The words “villa” and “arson,” always aligned at the centre, naturally create a terraced shape that echoes the site’s topography and the concrete ziggurat of the south-facing Italian terraces.
The visual identity highlights the surrounding landscape. It first draws the page’s spatial structure from its setting in Nice: the Villa Arson clings to the heights, while Nice is set on the shore. It also invites a renewed appreciation of the site’s uniqueness, revealing the gardens, the bosco, and the brutalist building through a three-colour panorama.
The visual identity relies on a custom typeface, Arsonist, inspired by narrow, high-contrast 1970s serif fonts and the villa’s architecture. Designed by Maxime Fittes (MA-MA Type), it balances rounded and angular forms, combining the monumental with the intimate—much like Michel Marot’s architecture, often too simplistically labelled brutalist. From afar, Arsonist impresses with its verticality; up close, it reveals refined details such as pronounced ink traps and beveled finishes.
Reflecting the horizontal structure of Michel Marot’s building, the website designed with Erik Hartin and Jerôme Rigaud is organised in successive layers. Its layout is intentionally minimal: vertical scrolling guides navigation, while content unfolds in text blocks punctuated by bold headlines. A strong typographic voice anchors the design, complemented by visuals drawn from the villa’s rich environment. From margins to background layers, the website design invests in and reclaims the periphery as its playground.
