Hôtel Bullioud

This guide to the Hotel Bullioud in Lyon follows a young, unproven architect just back from studying Rome, handed an impossible brief by a royal treasurer who owned two houses facing each other across a narrow courtyard. He wanted them joined at the upper floor without losing the well below or blocking the ground-floor doors his tenants used daily. Stand in the courtyard and look up at the gallery he strung between the two houses on projecting stone shells.