The Unfinished Inheritance
A residence in Ossuaire, a limestone city where ancestral burial rights prevent descendants from building on protected ground. Two unequal rectangular house towers stand to left and right of a broad, completely open front-to-back passage. The left tower has three storeys; the narrower right tower has four. A single heavy segmental limestone arch spans between their inward walls at second-floor level and carries one enclosed connecting room, with no pier in the passage. Keep the span structurally legible and the composition asymmetric. Thick rubble-limestone load-bearing walls have eroded chalk-white lime render, short reused jamb blocks and brick relieving arches. The bridge room has two cramped windows with ochre ceramic lattice shutters in dark iron frames. An iron balcony clings to the left outer flank. A narrow masonry stair climbs the right outer flank on small brick arches to a conspicuously blocked fourth-storey doorway; above it, unused corbels project into empty air where an extension was refused. Small shallow-vaulted rooms have almost flat stone-flag roofs and low parapets, with a small open roof court on the taller tower. The rear has irregular service windows, a squat added washroom and ceramic drains; the two outer side walls retain broad blind patches of former party walls. A closed stone hatch with recessed iron rings lies flush at the passage entrance. Doors are riveted iron, no exposed wood. The darkness comes from constricted living quarters built around a protected absence, blocked routes and denied growth; retain an ordinary inhabited domestic character without skulls, fantasy spikes or ruins.