Breton businessman François Pinault, founder of luxury group Kering, financed meter-thick restoration after it was damaged, during the wildfires, patching up its metre-thick stone walls, rammed-earth floors and the exposed oak frame supporting the slate roof.

Bouroullec, who was born and raised in Brittany, remembers the chapel from his childhood and was compelled to design a new altar and several furnishings for the building as part of the refurbishment.

Working in collaboration with local artisans, he used a trinity of roughly-hewn materials – granite, steel, and glass – that would stand the test of time while reflecting the building’s rugged rural location.

“Heavy enough not to be moved, sturdy enough not to be damaged, rough enough not to require cleaning, the elements that Ronan Bouroullec has placed in the chapel must succeed, despite or because of these characteristics, in creating a sensory experience,” wrote Martin Bethenod, former CEO of Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce museum, in an introductory text for the project.

“The bush-hammered granite, blurred glass, hammered steel, the choice of a galvanized finish to soften the contrast of the cross and candlesticks with the whiteness of the lime-rendered walls – each intervention combines sensations of roughness and softness, of force and tremor.”

Nuit celtique de Huelgoat granite has three pieces before local stone mason Christophe Chini created an altarpiece. Its horizontal base and a console table for candles and offerings.

Bethenod compares the dark stone, studded with shards of white, to “the starry night sky over the chapel, virtually devoid of light pollution”.

Moreover, The metal elements were the result of another collaboration. This time between Bouroullec and Roscoff-based metalworker Mathieu Cabioch.

Some of the candles stand directly on the altar while the rest are integrated into the Brutalist console table. Additionally, it consists of a long slab of granite, seemingly supported by several steel candle holders.

The final element in Bouroullec’s material trinity is glass, in the form of a large mirrored disc behind the altar.

Made by glassmakers from the Venice area, with whom Bouroullec has worked for several years. The piece creates a dialogue with the two stained-glass windows in the apse. Also, they are the chapel’s only surviving decorative element.

“More than a mirror, more than an object, it is a light source without physical substance. As if a round hole in the wall to reveal daylight, unpredictable and constantly changing,” said Bethenod.

Brittany is home to some of the world’s oldest standing architecture. Other projects making use of the region’s historic buildings include this conversion of a 17th-century barn into a printmaker’s studio.

The first new church in Brittany in the 21st century was by Álvaro Siza Vieira. Featuring a sculptural composition of intersecting concrete forms.