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41 rue Haute

Hôtel · Honfleur The Printed Home Rue Haute since 1893
Corner of a buttoned linen seat resting on a deep grey wool rug

The house and the people who made it

Colophon

A colophon is the note at the end of a book saying who printed it, where and when. This is that note for the house.

Two buildings, joined inside, on a street that has always belonged to the harbour. Everything below is checked against the town archive and the printers' own account books, which survived in the attic.

  1. 1786

    The front house is built for a Seine estuary pilot, three storeys of timber frame faced with slate on the weather side.

  2. 1893

    Augustin Lemercier, printer, buys the house and the empty chandlery next to it. He puts a press on the ground floor of the chandlery and his family in the rooms above.

  3. 1902

    The attic of the main house is boarded for children's rooms.

  4. 1911

    The back wing goes up for paper storage and the delivery cart.

  5. 1921

    The roof space over the shop is let to a sailmaker, who needs a long dry floor to lay out canvas.

  6. 1924

    The bindery is added at the end of the yard.

  7. 1944

    Honfleur comes through the summer almost undamaged. The shop prints ration notices and then, in August, posters for the liberation dance.

  8. 1974

    The last sailmaker retires. The loft is swept and locked.

  9. 1989

    The press is switched off for the final time. The Lemercier grandchildren keep the building but cannot agree what to do with it.

  10. 2019

    After four years of repair the house opens with fourteen rooms.

Section through both buildings, with the year each part was built or changed. ATTIC ROOMS, 1902 STREET ROOMS LIBRARY AND LOUNGE HALL AND GLASS ROOM SAIL LOFT, 1921 TO 1974 COMPOSING ROOMS PRESS ROOM, NOW THE DESK MAIN HOUSE, 1786 SHOP WING, PRINTING FROM 1893
Two houses, one roofline apart, joined inside on every floor since 1893.

What the shop printed

Mostly small things that a port needs every week. Tide tables, sold over the counter and at the harbour office. Notices for the fish auction. Labels for cider and calvados farms. Menus for the restaurants on the Quai Sainte-Catherine, reprinted whenever the dishes changed. Wedding invitations in the spring.

Neighbours called the place la maison imprimée, the printed house, because every window was full of posters and the whole building smelled of ink. When it opened as a hotel the English version of the name stuck, mainly because guests kept using it.

Dried pampas in a clay vase next to a sofa piled with cushions

What was kept

The shop counter, which is now the desk. The maple floor of the composing room. The oak shutters on the street. The hoist beam on the gable. Two hundred and twelve proof sheets from the archive, eleven of which hang in the rooms. The press itself went to a printing museum in 1990 and is still working there.

Play happens in a single room of this house, the loft over the old shop, and in no other place. The Printed Room takes no bets online, opens no player accounts and handles no payments through this website.