Our homebase was near Étrétat, a few kilometers north of Le Havre and only a few hundret meters away from the cliffs at the coast. The vaccation home was a quite old building with wooden floors squeaking at every footstep. Maybe it’s used to be an old farm house. Nevertheless, it was big engough to give us enough room to stay and use it as a base for our trips around.
In the Normandie the archictrure is quite different from the architecuture in Brittany even both regions are so close together. In Brittany the typical houses are build from rubblestones, broken rocks. In the Normandie instead, I found the houses build from flintstones bordered by other material, like bricks.
But in both regions I found houses contructured using latticed frameworks. In Germany you can also find houses built following the same idea, but tey were quite different. In Germany the wooden beams forming the skeleton are usually approximately 50 to 60 cm apart. The room in between is filled with hay and loam. Outside the houses are usually painted white with black beams ( I’ll put up another post with some samples soon).
In Normandie instead the beams are not that far from each other. That’s a result of the fact, that the thicker trees were use for building ships, so that only thinner beams were availlabe to build houses. Thinner beams, you know, arer less stable and less strong. Thus it was a necessity the leave only small room between the beams to get the house constructions stable.
The frame houses looked similar for me in Brittany and in Normandie. You can still find many of this houses in both regions, even in the bigger cities. In Germany instead you’ll find them still only in the countryside. In the cities they are usually replaced by more modern buildings.
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