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Key figures

Origin and history

Trouillet House, located in Rodez, Aveyron, adopts an elongated plan between Rue du Bal and Rue du Court-Comtal, taking over the right-of-way from a medieval building attested in 1495 under the name of Barthélemy Gauchoz's house. The esteemed books of 1450 and 1497 reveal a functional division between a house body — with three working rooms, a bedroom, a room on the first floor and a single room on the second — and a barn topped by two bedrooms. The façade on Rue du Bal, decorated with a flamboyant gothic decor, is distinguished by cross-windows (of which the sills have disappeared), arches in a braid, and counterfiche supporting the corbellation in wood.

The property originally belonged to the Goch family, mentioned in 1450 and 1497 as influential owners, probably wealthy merchants, like other families in the Bourg such as the Daulhou or the Maynard. The major transformation took place at the end of the 19th century, when the pharmacist Trouillet made it his home and his office. A neo-classical door with bosses and a ramp staircase on a ramp replaced the medieval access, while the ground floor, once pierced by workpieces, was adapted to the windows of the modern Pharmacy at the beginning of the 20th century. Two furniture elements (a hat holder and a mirror) in the stairwell also date from this period.

Ranked a Historic Monument in 1950 for its facade and roof, the house illustrates the evolution of a medieval merchant house towards a contemporary bourgeois use. Architectural traces — such as stack stumps confirming the distribution of the pieces — and archival documents (value books, view of 1495) help to reconstruct its original spatial organization. The absence of biographies of the medieval owners (Goch, Gauchoz) contrasts with the subsequent reputation of the pharmacist Trouillet, whose name remains associated with the building.

The decoration of the facade, characteristic of the late Gothic, includes support cords highlighting the windows, larmies on the second floor, and flamboyant arches curving the bays on the first floor. These stylistic elements are echoed in other Ruthenian houses (rue d-Armagnac, Place du Bourg), reflecting a local architectural tradition. The Trouillet House thus embodies the transition between the Middle Ages and the modern era, both by its preserved structure and by its successive redevelopments.

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