Historical property: what do we mean?
While we at Leyrit & Turpeau are certain that every stone has a story to tell, we know that bringing the history of a property to light is like telling the story of an entire civilisation on the scale of a house. At the start of every discovery of a property steeped in history, we are like real detectives, searching for all the information available on the ground. If you want to explore the soul of a home in depth, there's no limit to the questions you can ask, such as:
What is the history of the region in which the property is located?
What kind of architecture do we find in the region in question?
What is its immediate environment like?
What periods can we identify from the architecture?
What materials have been used?
What decorative elements adorn the architecture?
What type of people lived here?
In answering these questions, we rediscover with enthusiasm that each construction is a veritable mille-feuille. You have to trust your intuition and let the stones speak for themselves. Tracing the history of the estate is a stratigraphic approach, in the figurative sense of the term, because it involves studying each period like a geological layer interacting with the neighbouring strata. Highlighting and putting into perspective all of the components revealed, enables us to put forward a number of hypotheses that will be as fascinating as they are necessary to verify through in-depth study.
For example, the history of a region is reflected in its buildings. Did you know that the largest number of villas in Roman Gaul can be found in the southern half of the country? And that these villas, of which all that is left are the remains of pottery buried in the ground, were subsequently used as a starting point for the construction of castles? And did you know that the many conflicts between the kingdoms of France and England are illustrated by the distribution of fortified castles in the western half of the country? In fact, depending on the department, the number of fortresses in the former Plantagenet territory separating the kingdom of France from Guyenne - the fiefdom of the King of England in France in the 12th century - is up to 10 times higher than anywhere else.
Furthermore, there are specific types of houses found in each region. For example, it’s in Brittany that we find the most manor houses. And the country estate, which is somewhere between a chateau and a farmhouse, is particularly common in the countryside of Vendée and Charente. Indeed, these areas cover the entire former region of Poitou. These names and house styles are also directly linked to their immediate environment. A palace is usually an urban building or at least one adjacent to a town. And like a palace, a Hôtel Particulier - or grand townhouse - is also an integral part of a town. A fortified farm would be located in the remote countryside, requiring a suitable defensive position to cope independently with possible attacks or robberies.
