Opposite the famous Fort Boyard, the Fort des Saumonards stands proudly in Saint-Georges d’Oléron, in Charente-Maritime (17). Its impressive 2,400 square meter structure is hidden behind a dense forest, invisible from the ocean. The first tower of the fort was built under Napoleon I to protect the coast from the English. Then, in 1871, 500 fédérés were imprisoned within the walls of the fort after the insurrection of the Paris Commune. Some engraved their names and the date of their detention there. The Germans also occupied the Fort during the Second World War.
The Ministry of Defense then organized summer camps there for the children of soldiers before gradually abandoning it. The Fort closed its doors in 2012 but it did not sink into total oblivion since the State put it up for sale in June 2018, estimating its price at nearly 850,000 euros, with the sole condition that it continue to host summer camps. This is done: Xavier Niel, the founder of Free, won the State’s call for tenders and bought the Fort which extends over a plot of 25,000 square meters (for an undisclosed amount but which ends with 42 cents in a nod to his school). Objective? To turn it into a vacation center for students from the 42 school. The Fort can accommodate up to 225 people.
«The idea was not to renovate the Fort but to preserve all the marks of the different eras it has known, making it compatible with a holiday camp.“, explains Adrien Raoul, founder of AR Studio d’Architectures, which rehabilitated the Fort. The architects did not build new buildings but reused the existing ones to enhance them. “We removed the asbestos roofs of the old infirmary of the Fort and replaced them with lighter steel sheet sloping roofs. The framework was non-existent, we had to recreate wooden frameworks. In place of the framework, there was sand that we recovered for the dune.“, explain Adrien Raoul and Mélodie Bruillon, the project manager.Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed“, to quote the adage of the chemist Antoine Lavoisier. The former infirmary has given way to a common house, where students can meet and show a film, for example.
A school 42 version 2.0 in the heart of nature
Now, it’s time for Forty2 (a play on words between Fort and school 42), since July 2023. A sort of relocated campus where students can mix work and rest or spend vacation days, for a fee “very accessible“, according to the Forty2 teams, from May to the end of October. The minimum length of a stay is 4 days and the maximum length is 15. Students can enjoy a giant sandbox to play beach volleyball, a computer room under stone vaults to continue coding if they wish.
They also have staggered workstations so they can see and talk to each other to carry out group projects, a reading room, a games room (billiards, video games, etc.), a vegetable garden and a net stretched out to lie down in the middle of nature, above the sand dunes. Bicycles are also made available to them. Finally, seven dormitories made up of 210 bunk beds that look like cabins, “in order to find privacy in a shared space“, in the words of Adrien Raoul, have been installed. These are the same dormitories as for NOC 42 in Paris.
