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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

This 16th century house, located in Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, is distinguished by its typical Renaissance architecture. Its screw staircase serves two adjoining wings, with an original half-level distribution. Each floor has only one room, and the foreground rests on a cornice of granite crows. A tower overhanging, with a conical roof, houses circular spaces at each level. The bays on the ground floor evoke past commercial use, while the facade on Rue de la Châtelaine, more worked, contrasts with that of the perpendicular impasse.

The house would have belonged to the Dupuy family, as a marteled coat of arms on the lintel of the staircase, now illegible. Probably dating from the late 15th or early 16th century, the building was transformed: some bays were walled, and a chimney on the first floor was destroyed. The plot, subdivided in three in 1824, now forms a U around a central courtyard, where an octagonal pillar suggests the ancient existence of a portico. It was added to the additional inventory of Historic Monuments in 1929 and now houses on the first floor the Amis du Vieux Saint-Bonnet.

The building illustrates the urban evolution of Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, with traces of successive adaptations: traces of removal on the façade of the impasse, reuse of materials (like a piece of parquet from the old library), and change of vocation (from a private residence to a municipal use). The presence of shop windows on the ground floor reflects its integration into the medieval or reborn economic fabric, while the turret and the staircase in vis underline its initial social status, probably linked to an affluent family like the Dupuy.

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