Bernard Magrez Cultural Institute
Neoclassical eighteenth-century mansion turned contemporary art house behind wrought-iron gates.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Bernard Magrez Cultural Institute in Bordeaux opens with an odd question about the wrought-iron gates in front of you and a bottle of whisky that never touched Scotland. It traces the mansion from 1773, when bookseller brothers Jacques and Antoine Labottiere built it as a bid for aristocratic standing, through bankruptcy in the Revolution and a string of later owners including a dance hall entrepreneur, a mayor and the Jesuits. It then follows Bernard Magrez, who started out selling wine door to door before a fake-Scotch brand made his fortune, back to this ruined address. Stand in the courtyard and you're looking at several very different Bordeaux fortunes stacked on one plot.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design
Neoclassical mansion of table arts, ceramics, glassware and faience, built on colonial sugar and coffee fortunes.
CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux
Nineteenth-century colonial warehouse of stone and timber, now vast naves of light for contemporary art.
Musée de la Création Franche
Former private house turned gallery of outsider art, holding roughly twenty thousand self-taught and untrained creators' works.
C.I.V.B - Conseil Interprofessionnel du Vin de Bordeaux
First-floor wine bar in an eighteenth-century mansion, pouring thirty Bordeaux wines by the glass beneath stained glass and an Aubusson tapestry.
Parc Rivière
Château ruins and beehives set within a four-hectare wooded park with a wooden playground.
Cinéma Utopia
Deconsecrated medieval church turned art-house cinema, built above a forgotten graveyard.