Bresse house
A Bresse house[1] (French: ferme bressane or maison bressane, German: Bressehaus) is a timber-framed house of post-and-beam construction, that is infilled with adobe bricks and is typical of the Bresse region of eastern France.
This configuration offers the optimum protection from the bise, a cold northerly wind typical of the region, which is deflected over the house by the low, sweeping roof on the northern gable end.
The living rooms are on the south side, the main façade facing the morning sun.
As construction activity took place mainly in winter, outside the busy summer season, there was often a deviation in alignment.
Where the buildings were separate, the threshing barn and stables would be built in succession along the eastern side of the yard.
The main room of the farmhouse was called la maison in the south, le hutau in the north.
This part of the house was regularly built of natural or fired bricks, the floor was made of packed earth.
A long, narrow oak table stood in the centre of the room under the ridge purlin from which the spoons and forks hung.
Against the narrow wall behind the Saracen fireplace stood the bench (archebanc), which was solemnly blessed when the house was moved into.
A corner of the room was reserved for the chapel, a kind of domestic altar, with a simple figure of Mary, a stoup, a candle or two, images of saints and patriotic prints.
A huge, inverted funnel, attached to the ridge and middle purlins, acted as a flue.
The flue began in the living room and extended in a funnel shape to the roof, where it merged into the picturesque mitra (chimney).
The open fireplace was widespread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and up to the end of the 19th century and was nothing unusual.
Depending on the level of prosperity, a Bresse house may be supplemented with outbuildings or extensions.
These include sheds, chicken coops, pigeon lofts or sheep and goat pens.
In the southeast of the Bresse region, the stables are often attached to the house at right angles and thus form an angular building.
Long balancing poles with counterweights were originally common in northern Bresse, but today the wells are all equipped with cranks and chains.
In the marshy region of Bellevesvre and Beauvernois, small, squalid huts on stilts existed until the 1930s.
