hotel
History
Fourvière Hôtel

History

hotel
Fourvière Hill

A site steeped in history

The Fourvière Hôtel Lyon is located at 23 rue Roger Radisson, sitting just above the Roman theater and the Odéon and below the Basilica. It has reinvented the convent built by Pierre-Marie Bossan for the Sisters of the Visitation, who had left the nearby Croix-Rousse district due to the social unrest of the time.

The hotel opens onto the Parc des Hauteurs, a peaceful green space originally intended to house the nuns' enclosure. The neighboring Parc de la Visitation is now a public park that is very popular with local residents.

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Architecture

Convent of the Visitation

The Convent of the Visitation, built in 1854, was one of Pierre-Marie Bossan's first projects in Lyon. Bossan was not yet the major religious architect that we know today as the creator of the Basilica of Fourvière. Bound by the strict rules of the architectural model required by the rules of the Order of the Visitation, he created a perfectly symmetrical construction designed to illustrate the balance and fullness of religious life.

The building is a harmonious whole that alternates brick with white limestone and yellow Couzon stone rubble.

It is designed on a square plan with three floors. On the ground floor, four wings surround an enclosed cloister, forming the peristyle. The peristyle was initially accessed through the main entrance and a vestibule located in the east wing. In the west wing, the convent church is perpendicular to the cloister, as stipulated by the rules of the order. A double-flight stone staircase leads to both upper floors.

Few of the convent's original interior fittings have been preserved, since the building has experienced many ups and downs during its history. It was home to a boarding school for young girls until 1903, then housed the wounded during WWI, and was later sold to the municipality of Lyon in 1965. At the time, André Malraux and Louis Pradel intended it to be used as an architecture school. Instead, it was rented to the Hospices Civils de Lyon hospital system in 1970 and used as housing for student nurses until 1974, when it became the repository for the Archives of the historic Hôtel Dieu hospital.

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the hotel

The reception area and the chapel

Jean-Luc Mathias and Marianne Borthayre, the hotel's founders, set out to meticulously preserve the spirit and structure of the former convent. The challenge was successfully taken on by the éhôtels-Lyon group, which harmonized the existing structures with the updates required for the site to operate as a hotel.

Between September 2013 and July 2014, the chapel was fully restored to its original state by Atelier Royal, with the patronage of Bâtiments de France. The former chapel now houses the hotel reception area.

The oak reception desk and the multicoloured lighting of the second-hand key cabinet echo Bossan's intuition. He had intended the chapel to be a "laboratory of shapes," a work of art that emphasized symbolic ornamentation and a profusion of rich colors enhanced with gold.

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The rooms

"Discover the story of Lyon..."

Spread around the cloister, the 75 rooms of the Fourvière Hotel trace the history of Lyon, telling guests the story of this great city. Each room reveals a piece of history through the city's emblematic figures: Lucius Munatius Plancus, Pierre-Marie Bossan, the Lumière Brothers... 75 figures from the distant past to more recent times to ensure there is something for everyone were selected to appear on the guest room doors.

A short historical notice on the back of each door pays homage to these figures and briefly lays out their contributions to the history, and to the stories, of Lyon and elsewhere.

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Pablo Reinoso

A Franco-Argentinian Artist

The artist Pablo Reinoso worked closely with the Fourvière Hôtel Lyon team to guide the artistic side of the hotel's development.

The project: transforming a 19th century convent into a 4-star hotel. That meant modernizing the building's spaces, opening them up to the outside, and creating new corridors to help the convent live out its new vocation.

Reinoso has also created a sculpture path specifically for this space that unfolds from the entrance to the cloister. Fôret Fourvière, Fourvière Bench and Stopping-sur-Nuage guide travelers through the building and invite them to enter fully into the Fourvière Hôtel Lyon universe.

This sculpture path is a true in-situ work. Each sculpture is in dialogue with the architecture of the convent, offering a new reading of the spaces. This delicate work weaves a strong link between the building's historical heritage and the contemporary world. With these sculptures, Reinoso gives us the thread to unfold a story yet to be written, that of the Fourvière Hôtel Lyon.

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