Hôtel Saint-Firmin, ancien hôtel Gaudin de Lancier

English translation

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History

The Hôtel Saint-Firmin de Gordes, under the ancien Régime a residence of the Gaudin de Lancier family who served the lords of the place, is merely the visible part of an "iceberg" that juxtaposes and superimposes multiple elements, rediscovered, cleared and restored over the past thirty years. Indeed, grouped within the current property is the greater part of a block largely in ruins, situated within the walls in the upper part of the town, to the east of the church. It shelters the remains of medieval constructions whose implantation conditioned the structure of the roadways and buildings until the present day. Traces of the 14th-century urban fortification are also detectable. Particularly complex, the ensemble allows one to evoke the life and evolution of a neighbourhood since the Middle Ages: housing, economic activity, street network, land parcels. One notes in particular the basement floor of a flattened medieval dwelling, whose barrel-vaulted rooms are attributable to the 12th-13th centuries, a troglodytic mill equipped with two presses situated in the southern part (15th century), another larger more recent mill on the second basement level of the hôtel, and a whole series of remarkably hewn troglodytic rooms and facilities, distributed over several levels (rooms, cellars, cisterns, vats, gutters, passages...). All of this is hidden today beneath terraces, which compensate for the steep slope. The hôtel particulier occupies the north-western part and is accessible by the rue du Four. It comprises a small courtyard, a staircase cage opening onto it and two wings of relatively modest size comprising ground floor and two storeys. Built at the beginning of the 17th century, the building has suffered over the years, particularly in the 18th century, a number of changes which progressively truncated it of several parts, to the west as to the south-east where a second closed courtyard must have existed. Today the most remarkable elements are the Louis XIII portal on the street, the large cross-windows with bosses or superimposed orders of the main body, and, to a lesser degree, the salon of the four seasons on the ground floor. But the most interesting is the ramped staircase, with the profusion of its balusters and the stucco diamond-point decoration of its ceilings; despite a certain heaviness and some awkwardnesses, one could no doubt compare it to more urban examples, from Montpellier or Lyon. Other elements, such as the doors in the angle, have their models at the château de Gordes. Even if it is heterogeneous and much restored, the ensemble presents unquestionably great interest. The painter André Lhote wrote in 1943 that it was "the finest residence in Gordes".