I recently watched Mon Oncle for the first time, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the house. Jacques Tati’s satire moves slowly, through gestures, sounds, and silences, but Villa Arpel — the antiseptic modernist home at the heart of the film — lingers like a riddle. Its geometry is pristine, its surfaces gleam, its fountain gurgles only for guests. It is both a comic set and an architectural thesis, a home that looks perfect yet resists being lived in. And behind its uncanny precision was Jacques Lagrange, the painter and scenographer who translated Tati’s critique of modernism into glass, steel, and stone.
Lagrange’s credit on Mon Oncle is not a footnote. He is listed as a creative collaborator and artistic adviser, and historical production notes make clear that the Villa Arpel sets were conceived with him and built on the Victorine backlot near Nice in 1956 before being dismantled after filming. The film’s geometries — the glass boxes, the colored stone paths, the cartoonish automation of household appliances — are as much his invention as they are Tati’s. That tight coupling of cinematic gag and architectural idea is why the set still reads as a critique rather than a pastiche.
To understand how an artist like Lagrange came to design a “house you can’t live in,” it helps to step back into his biography. Born in Paris in 1917 into a family of architects and artists, Lagrange trained at the École nationale des Arts Décoratifs and the École des Beaux-Arts; his work moved fluidly between painting, tapestry cartoons, and monumental public commissions. By the 1950s, he had become a respected presence in Parisian artistic circles, creating tapestries and large-format works for public buildings, while also teaching later in life at the École des Beaux-Arts. That hybrid career — as a painter, designer, and teacher — is what gave him the tools to translate an idea into a built, filmable architecture.
The partnership between Tati and Lagrange was not incidental. They met in the mid-1940s and collaborated for decades, Lagrange serving repeatedly as an artistic adviser and co-writer on projects that required a precisely choreographed environment: Mon Oncle, Playtime, Trafic, and others. Lagrange understood, like Tati, that comedy for them was spatial first — a set of relations between bodies and objects — and that the design of space could itself become a character. In Mon Oncle, that character is the Arpel household: elegant, efficient, inhuman.
What Lagrange did with Villa Arpel — and what makes it enduringly provocative for architects — was to literalize a modernist anxiety. Every element is perfectly resolved as an object, but the ensemble denies ease. Chairs are sculptures; lawns are color-coded patches; the fountain is a status prop. Tati’s succinct observation that “geometrical lines do not produce likeable people” finds its visual translator in Lagrange’s drawings and models: a modernism that has been fetishized into spectacle. Writers and critics have since treated the set as both indictment and hymn — an architecture that is both admired for its formal clarity and mocked for its emotional sterility.
Lagrange left a material trace in architecture beyond cinema. He designed monumental works integrated into built projects: the painted ceiling for Édouard Albert’s Tour Croulebarbe (Tour Albert) in the late 1950s, pavements in marble for the Jussieu science faculty in the late 1960s, and the floor of the main concourse at Gare Montparnasse. These commissions — the kind produced through postwar public-art programs and collaborations between artists and architects — are an explicit example of how Lagrange’s painterly instincts migrated into the field of urban design. They show an artist who was comfortable thinking at building scale, translating pictorial rhythm into the daily circulation of a city.
That cross-pollination matters. Lagrange’s work on public floors and ceilings is not mere decoration; it reframes functional surfaces as places of encounter and memory. The Jussieu project, for instance, was part of the French “1% artistique” conversation about integrating art into architecture; Lagrange’s marble parvis included epigraphic elements and a lexical program that braided literature, science, and poetry into the campus ground. In other words, he didn’t simply ornament buildings — he authored spatial narratives that asked people to read a city as they moved across it.
The afterlife of Villa Arpel underlines Lagrange’s influence on design culture. The set has been reconstructed, exhibited, and mined by designers and fashion houses: life-size re-creations have appeared at Paris’s Centquatre and in museum and fair contexts, and designers have repeatedly referenced the film’s furniture and motifs in later work. This is a fascinating loop: a film set that was originally a critique of sterile modernism becomes, for later generations, an aesthetic vocabulary to be celebrated and re-used — proof that Lagrange’s visuals transcended their satirical origin to become architecture’s shorthand for a certain modern idea.
If there is an essential lesson in Lagrange’s trajectory, it is this: the boundaries between painting, tapestry, scenography, and architecture are porous. Lagrange’s career — tapestries in national collections, ceilings and pavements for new towers and universities, scenographic inventions for cinema — models how an artist can move between disciplines without diluting authorship. His best work resists being “beautiful” in isolation and instead demands a social reading: what happens when form becomes habit, when an object suggests a behavior? Those are the questions he set for us, whether on a screen in 1958 or on a marble slab in 1970.
Watching Mon Oncle now, the film still feels like a small architecture lesson wrapped in laughter. Lagrange’s hand — the sketches, the color patches, the deliberately unlivable furniture — forces us to think about what design is for. He wasn’t simply an illustrator for Tati’s jokes; he was an interlocutor, translating cinematic irony into built form and, in the process, nudging architecture to ask whether its language serves people or only impresses them. That, perhaps, is the enduring and most useful legacy of his work.
