Interior 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 Come 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 photo shows the courtyard of the H�tel d’�vreux. The ground floor of the court elevation is simple and even monumental, and the first storey is decorated with an elegant motif of a medallion supported by laurels which is taken from Fran�ois Mansart’s fa�ade of the Carnavalet.

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