Why Dieppe’s beach huts are an icon of France’s seaside heritage

From the deck of the ferry approaching Dieppe (Seine-Maritime) from Newhaven, the town reveals itself in stages. First come the pale cliffs, then the castle above the western end of the seafront, then the casino and the buildings facing the Channel. 

Closer in there emerges a procession of small pitched roofs belonging to shoreline cabins. Individually, these cabins are barely buildings but together, they have become part of Dieppe’s face to the sea.

“We were under enormous pressure,” Zoé Cosme, whose practice Atelier Cosme Architecture won a 2018 tender to redesign them, tells The Connexion.

She and her husband (and business co-founder) Maxime had been warned from the start – no blue-and-white seaside stripes and no garish colours. This was Dieppe, they were told: find an architectural language that belonged to Dieppe and, above all, do not change the character of its beach. The warning reflected how much was already invested in these little structures.

Dieppe’s beach, Ms Cosme said, is several things at once: a place of bains de mer and tourists, but also of fishermen; a popular seafront with heritage lawns, wartime history and users drawn from across the social spectrum.

For the architects, that made the project much bigger than the size of a hut suggested. A single cabin was “micro-architecture”, Ms Cosme says. Multiplied across the beach, however, the cabins created a built line between town and sea.

Dieppe is not alone in allowing such modest structures to become part of its public image.

At Deauville (Calvados), beach cabins form part of the Art Deco bains pompéiens, inaugurated in 1924. The white barriers separating them carry the names of actors and film-makers honoured by the town’s American Film Festival, including John Travolta and Natalie Portman. This year’s edition honoured Ethan Hawke, Brendan Fraser, Faye Dunaway and Susan Sarandon.

The ancestor of the modern beach hut was the British bathing machine, essentially a wooden changing room on wheels. One is recorded in England as early as 1721. A horse could pull it into the water, allowing the bather to change in privacy. The idea spread to continental Europe during the 19th Century. 

Dieppe occupies a special place in that history. Local guide Laura Dubuc traced the fashion for sea bathing directly to the English. It was popularised at Dieppe by the Duchesse de Berry, whose much-observed bathing visit in 1824 helped establish the town as France’s first seaside resort, she told ICI Normandie.

At a time when showing the body in public was unthinkable, the cabin’s purpose was simple: somewhere to undress. Two centuries later, that problem has largely disappeared. The cabins have not. Instead, their use has changed.

In Dieppe, they have become miniature bases beside the sea: places where families spend the day, eat, play or share an apéritif as evening falls. Many are closely tied to local families and passed from one generation to another.

Elsewhere, the attachment can be just as strong. At Gravelines (Nord), some families turn cabins measuring just 2.5m by 2.5m into summer second homes; at Malo-les-Bains (Nord), more than 1,000 people have sought one of 195 cabins. That evolution mattered when Ms Cosme came to redesign Dieppe’s.

“Dieppe beach is not a place of sophistication or display,” she says. “It is a simple place for meeting and sharing.”

The architecture had to express the same thing. The practice looked towards childhood, outdoor life, the landscape and what Ms Cosme calls “the simple pleasures of the sea”.

The cabins kept a deliberately simple pitched-roof silhouette, while their colours were drawn from the surrounding territory. Each colour was assigned a letter, so that the sequence of huts spells out a particularly Dieppois phrase: Des galets plein les yeux – pebbles as far as the eye can see.

The result also had to be functional. Salt in the air is brutal on materials, while the risk of flooding means the cabins must be capable of being evacuated quickly. Inside, the timber framing doubles as something useful, giving occupants places to hang belongings.

The tradition also sustains a small local craft. Carpenter Jérémy Bonnet began building and restoring beach cabins in 2024 as a sideline with fellow carpenter Thomas Durand. Together they make around four a year, for about €7,000 each, for private clients in Bernières-sur-Mer and along the Côte de Nacre. Some end up on beaches, others in gardens.

“My mother was born in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. There is a family and memorial aspect to it. The cabins are part of the heritage of the Côte de Nacre,” he tells The Connexion. 

The cabin has travelled a surprisingly long way for such a small building: from a device designed to preserve modesty to changing room, shelter, family meeting place, miniature second home and object of local pride.

Ms Cosme did not expect her Dieppe cabins to make another transition. “The cabins we designed have become an icon,” she says.

She notices it when she returns to Dieppe, although her practice is based elsewhere. Their image appears repeatedly on social media; the cabins have been used on posters and turned into objects.

“It is quite rare for us to get so much feedback from one of our projects.”