Immobilière Dassault

In 1869, the Camondo brothers moved to Paris to develop the family bank. They established their homes on the southern outskirts of the Parc Monceau, which was being subdivided by the Pereire brothers.

In June 1870, the Camondos acquired two adjoining plots of land on rue de Monceau. At 61 rue de Monceau, they commissioned French architect Denis-Louis Destors to build a luxury hotel.

For the construction of 61 Monceau, Denis-Louis Destors was awarded the Grande médaille d'argent de l'architecture privée by the Société Centrale des Architectes.

Completed in October 1875, this vast residence comprises a main building or “Grand Hôtel”, set between courtyard and garden.

The sons of the Camondo brothers also became bankers and major art collectors during the Third Republic. Their unique collection can be seen today at the Musée Nissim-de-Camondo, 63 rue de Monceau.

In 1893, 61 Monceau was sold to Gaston Menier. A politician and industrialist, he inherited and developed the Menier chocolate factory. His son sold the hotel in 1946, and it became the headquarters of Aciéries de Pompey (a steel company).

Subsequently, the 61 Monceau has belonged to other owners, who have restructured it and modified its interior layout and décor. The facades and roof were added to the supplementary inventory of historic monuments in 1977.

The 16 Paix, built in 1808, has been given a new lease of life through a preserved, re-sewn building tradition, where innovation lies both in the care taken in conserving and surgically renovating existing structures, restored with the utmost care, and in replacing altered wooden structures with new ones.

The result is an address with a singular architecture, a unique product and a discreet, unobtrusive technical performance that preserves the building's DNA while giving it a prestigious address and legibility, at the corner of Rue de la Paix and Rue Daunou, with Place Vendôme as a backdrop.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

The Passage Jouffroy was built in 1845, a year before the Passage Verdeau. Yet the two passages are part of the same project. The first was designed by architects François-Hippolyte Destailleur and Romain de Bourges.

The architects were responding to the program of a private commercial company presided over by Count Félix de Jouffroy-Gonsans and Monsieur Verdeau, each of whom bequeathed his name to the passages. It links Boulevard Montmartre to the south, with Rue de la Grange Batelière to the north, and is perfectly aligned with Passage des Panoramas and Passage Verdeau.

The construction of covered passageways in Paris took off in the first part of the 19th century. The Passage Jouffroy is one of the last covered passageways to be built in the capital, and therefore benefits from a number of technological innovations over its predecessors.

Built on several plots of land in continuation of the already popular Passage des Panoramas (1800), it features a double elbow in its right-of-way, with steps to catch up with the different levels of the boulevard and the street.

Apart from a few modifications, its architecture today retains its period cachet. But, like most Parisian passages, it seems to have lost the aura it once enjoyed thanks to the modernity and liveliness it embodied, and which placed it so singularly in the history of the capital and the evolution of mores.

Embodying the societal changes of the time, there were many critics of these new urban spaces. In Paris, capitale du XIXème siècle (1924-1939), Walter Benjamin aptly defines Parisian passages: “These passages, the new invention of industrial luxury, are glass-covered, marble-panelled galleries that run through entire blocks of buildings whose owners have grouped together to create a new city.

whose owners have banded together for such speculative purposes. On either side of these galleries, which receive daylight from above, line up the most elegant boutiques, so that such a passageway is a city, a world in miniature”.