Pierre Le Muet

Who was Pierre Le Muet?

Pierre Le Muet was a French architect famous for his book Manière de bâtir pour toutes sortes de personnes, and for the châteaux he constructed, most notably Tanlay in Burgundy, as well as some modest houses in Paris, the grandest of which, the Hôtel d'Avaux survives and has recently been restored to a semblance of its seveneenth-century condition.

Le Muet had accompanied the royal armies in the south of France. His Manière de bâtir gave designs for town houses in the Parisian mode, designed to occupy eleven lots from the simplest most constricted plot of urban land to hôtels particuliers of middling importance. Claude Mignot points out that his model in this enterprise was Sebastiano Serlio, whose sixth book, elle habitationi de tutti li gradi degli huomini was already circulating in France in manuscript; Salomon de Brosse's manuscript copy is at the Avery Library of Columbia University. The additional designs in 1645 show Le Muet the builder of three Parisian residences, the maison Tubeuf, and the hôtels Coquet and d’Avaux, and of three châteaux: Château de Pont-sur-Seine, Aube, the Château de Tanlay and the Château de Chavigny at Lerné. Marot worked from drawings furnished by Le Muet which corrected some irregularities demanded by exigencies of the actual sites, regularizing the court at Tanlay, for instance or giving an elevation and section never executed at the hôtel d’Avaux.