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Intra muros, Saint-MaloThebooksea

The house

Granite from Chausey on a reinforced frame, slate from the Ardennes on the roof, and beneath the whole of it a barrel vault of about 1680 cut into the rock.

August 1944

The fire began on the sixth and burned for eight days. Of the eight hundred and sixty-five buildings inside the walls, about one hundred and eighty-two survived in any form. What stood afterwards, almost without exception, was stone below street level: cellars, vaults, the bases of walls.

The reconstruction was governed by a plan that most people at the time disliked and that almost everybody now defends. It required granite facings, slate roofs, dormers of a stated proportion, and the street lines of 1939. It also allowed a reinforced concrete frame behind the granite, which is why these houses are warmer and straighter than they look.

1954

This house was among the earlier completions. The front is five bays, the door is off centre to the left, and the dormer is the plan's standard dormer, which is why it matches the house opposite and the one next to that. The window proportions are slightly taller than the later houses on the same street, a detail of the first phase that nobody notices until it is pointed out and that nobody can then stop seeing.

The cellar

About 1680, for a ship-owner. A single barrel vault running the depth of the front rooms, built of the same granite, with two lights to the pavement and a chute that came in through the street wall. Three metres below the pavement. It was used as a shelter in 1944 by eleven people who have all been traced, and four of whom were still alive in 2011 and came to look at it.

Since

  • 1976 to 1996: flats, four of them, and the cellar used as a store.
  • 1998: the house bought and opened with six rooms.
  • 2005: the attic opened up, taking the count to nine.
  • 2012 to 2018: the nine bathrooms, one a winter.
  • 2019: the roof, in slate, to the plan's specification because the plan still applies.
  • 2024: the cellar lined, wired, drained, heated and fitted out, with the vault left visible throughout.

The lining of the cellar

The condition of consent was that nothing could be fixed to the vault, so the lining stands clear of it on its own frame, 120 millimetres off the stone, and the gap is lit. From inside, the vault is entirely visible and entirely untouched, which was the point of the condition and is the best thing about the room.

The people

Ten of us. Two in the hall, three in the kitchen and at table, two on the rooms, two at the cellar door and counter, one who does the accounts and the laundry and has been here since 1999.

The front of the house on the rue de la Pie qui Boit A granite front of four storeys and a dormer attic, five windows wide on the upper floors, with a door to the left of centre and two cellar lights at pavement level. the street door cellar lights at pavement level rue de la Pie qui Boit
The front elevation, drawn to the reconstruction plan's proportions.

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