The Chavonne Village was created in 1916-1917 on the initiative of the Alluminio Italiano company. It included warehouses, production areas, offices, staff residences, a shop and a cinema. 
The shed, built in 1917, has a single 85m long aisle, covered by 11m long wooden trusses and supported by massive stone walls. It was used for many years as a warehouse for Cogne, one of Europe’s leading producers of long stainless-steel products. When Cogne closed the facility in the early 1990s, the licensed area became public property. Years of neglect followed. 
The transformation of the abandoned warehouse into a carpentry workshop has become a leading project and case study for preservation-renovation practices and environmental performance. 

New wood trusses braced with steel cables and a new insulation substitute a collapsed roof.  
A new additional object, a two-storey, steel-framed, black-painted service unit, is housing the furnace room, the air handling unit and the cloakroom, and dividing the heated workshop from a warehouse. 
A biomass system reusing the wood waste produced by the workshop activity has been chosen based on a 50-year life cycle LCA-LCC (Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing) analysis. It feeds an induction air diffusion system with micro-perforated ducts capable of switching to free-cooling mode in the summer, using air from the outside at night to cool the processing area with no energy expense.