Hôtel de Saint-Aignan

The Hôtel de Saint-Aignan stands as one of the most refined examples of seventeenth-century Parisian architecture, but its exterior walls hide a clever architectural deception. Because the building sits on an irregularly shaped plot, the architect Pierre Le Muet could not construct a perfectly symmetrical courtyard. To create the visual illusion of balance, he built a blank facade on the left side of the courtyard and adorned it with pilasters and false windows that mirror the actual functional wing on the right. This left-hand wall is not just a decorative mask, however. It was built directly against a surviving remnant of the massive defensive wall constructed by King Philip Augustus around the year 1200. This mansion thus holds within its structure both the grand aesthetic ambitions of the seventeenth-century aristocracy and the ancient, heavy stone fortifications of the medieval city.