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Salomé's A Frame house
Building a house yourself—many dream of it, but some actually do it. That’s the case for Salomé and Kevin, two YouTubers who built a timber-frame house and documented their journey on their YouTube channel Comme un Pingouin. With this experience under her belt, Salomé decided to take on a new challenge alone: building an A-frame house.
Simply put, an A-frame house is essentially a large roof that doubles as a living space.
An A-frame house is a simple type of dwelling characterized by a dual-pitched roof that starts at the foundation line and meets at the ridge. This distinctive triangular shape gives the structure its comparison to the letter "A." Simply put, an A-frame house is essentially a large roof that doubles as a living space.
Common in many countries, traces of A-frame houses can be found throughout history in Europe and Japan (such as the Minka houses). In France, it’s also famously associated with the home of the comic book hero Asterix.
This type of structure is ideal for self-building, as the timber frame can be constructed and assembled by one or two people with minimal lifting equipment. For her project, Salomé was inspired by the self-built A-frame house of Élizabeth Faure at the age of 65, which was featured in a documentary available here.
Unlike Élizabeth Faure’s A-frame house, which used asphalt shingles, Salomé chose sandwich panels for her project due to their excellent insulation properties. Since the roof is the most visible part of an A-frame house, she was also looking for a product with appealing aesthetics. This led her to select the JI Vieo Roof panels from Joris Ide.
The narrow grooves of these panels create a modern and minimalist look, similar to the utilitarian style of traditional standing-seam zinc roofs. With a PIR foam core sandwiched between two metal sheets, the panels provide excellent dimensional rigidity, enhancing the overall strength of the structure. Additionally, the Grandemat coating on the exterior sheet features an anti-slip texture, making the roof easier to install and maintain.
To install the roof, Salomé used a suction-cup lifting beam to handle the 8.5-meter-long panels. Once equipped, the installation process was quick—just under two days to cover 270m² with insulated roofing!