Hôtel Groslot: Detail, looking at gates and courtyard from Place de l'Etape

Jacques Groslot, the town’s bailiff, had this house built in the Renaissance which, after the Revolution, became the Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall). It was only at the end of the 16th century in Orleans that secular architecture adopted new models and replaced street-gabled houses of wood and mud or brick with hôtels: usually a range of apartments connected by a gallery with stair turret to a second range across a courtyard. Use of red brick, often embellished with decorative lozenges of black, glazed bricks was replaced in the first half of the 16th century with stone. The brick façades of the Hôtel de Ville (formerly Hôtel Groslot; after 1549; attrib. Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau) are a late example.