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Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The hotel Saint-Georges is a former mansion located in Vannes, Morbihan, built in the 1st quarter of the 18th century on the site of a 17th century building destroyed at the end of the same century. It originally belonged to the Lenvos Charpentier family and was requisitioned during the French Revolution to house the officers of the General Staff. In 1802 he temporarily welcomed Bishop de Pancemont, bishop concordataire of Vannes, before his official installation at the convent of the Carmelites. In the 19th century, the hotel passed into the hands of Edmond Ferrary, a renowned caterer, and then of the Harscouët family of Saint-Georges, who gave it its present name.

The hotel architecture, sober and classic, is distinguished by its three levels: a granite ground floor, white stone floors, and a facade on Rue des Orfèvres covered with tuffeau. The walled openings, wrought iron balconies, and triangular pediments animate the facades. Inside, a wooden staircase of the seventeenth century, vestige of the original building, coexists with old woodwork on the first floor. The courtyard, paved and lined with two asymmetric wings, preserves an historic kitchen with its granite fireplace, accessible from a venal leading to rue de la Monnaie.

Ranked a historic monument since 1 March 1945, the hotel protects its street façades, roof, first floor woodwork and staircase. The archives reveal a complex evolution: built between 1677 and 1757, probably at the end of the seventeenth century, it was modified in the eighteenth century in a neo-classical style by Pierre Jean-Baptiste Louis Charpentier, seigneur of Lanvaux. Requisitioned during the Revolution, it also houses a monitoring committee. In the 19th century, transformations adapted its stables into shops, while the Saint-Georges family ascribed its name.

Sources also mention prominent owners, such as Jean Guitern du Defaye, doctor of the King in 1757, or Pierre Grimon, doctor of medicine who sold the hotel in 1762. The cadastral archives finally evoke Edmond Ferrary, a medal-winning pastry maker, who arranges a vegetable garden on the second floor for his culinary preparations. The hotel thus illustrates the evolution of the uses of an aristocratic building, moving from private residence to revolutionary power, then to artisanal and commercial space.

Today, the Hotel Saint-Georges remains a testimony of the civil architecture of the eighteenth century valveese, mixing classic sobriety and ornamental details, while bearing the traces of the social and political transformations of modern Brittany.

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