Exterior view

During the 1680s Bullet was responsible for a number of designs for private houses which show him to be a supporter of the classical tradition of the previous generation, and little affected by the innovations of Hardouin-Mansart at Versailles. In the very first years of the eighteenth century, however, he built two houses of great novelty. The rich financier Crozat the Elder bought two of the sites at the corner of the Place Vend�me and commissioned Bullet to construct on them houses for himself (finished 1702) and for his son-in-law, the Comte d’�vreux (1707).

The irregulatory of the site of the H�tel d’�vreux, of which the street frontage consists only of four out of five bays of the cut-off corner of the Place Vend�me, has provoked a brilliant solution, including a diagonal approach to the courtyard, through a circular porte-coch�re. Bulllet has managed to form a symmetrically disposed court, rounded at one end and closed by a portico at the other. The H�tel Crozat presented a more regular site, but Bullet has been no less clever in using it. The most remarkable feature of this plan, however, is the great variety in the shapes of the rooms. On the first floor the gallery, and antechamber, and the front bedroom all have rounded ends; the Cabinet is equipped with a niche-shaped protuberance which allows access from two doors; and the vestibule, squeezed between two spiral staircases, has the shape of a T, with an oval dome at the crossing of the two axes.

The photo shows the fa�ade of the H�tel Crozat.

View the plan of the first floor in small or enlarged form.