What is an Hotel-Musée ?
SLEEP MORE CULTURED
Refinement, comfort, and heritage
A museum you can touch.
Here, you look with your hands!
The idea of the Museum-Hotel was born from the frustration of seeing collections in museums removed from their function and deprived of life. In the Museum-Hotel, we have selected objects that can still be used, allowing guests to live with them during their stay.
The invention of the concept
It seems that the term museum-hotel was first used by "The First Nations Museum-Hotel," a hotel complex opened in Quebec in 2008 to promote the heritage of North American Indian populations present before the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century. The term was reused in 2020 by Matthieu Chauvin when formalizing the project to open the "Museum-Hotel of Villa Bagatelle" to the public in Irigny, France. It was developed for the first time in the grant application submitted to the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region for the opening of an atypical hotel. The term was also used around the same time by the "Santa Maria la Nova" convent in Naples and the "Citadelle Vauban Museum-Hotel," a hotel installed in the fortress overlooking the port of Le Palais in Belle-Île-en-Mer.
The same idea emerged in different places in France without coordination: a symptom, perhaps, of a need (or a desire) to reconnect with a way of life and historical roots.
Description
As developed by Matthieu Chauvin, a museum-hotel is accommodation where guests are invited to come into contact with ancient objects and live daily, during their stay, in a museum-quality environment.
This concept was the subject of a Master's thesis in museography in 2022, by Ninon Bouley, a student at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, under the direction of François de Vergnette. Ninon Bouley delved into the concept to define it precisely and conducted a survey to characterize public expectations for this new type of accommodation.
The term Museum-Hotel does not refer to a legal status or an operational model. It can apply to a hotel, guest rooms, igloo installations, camping, or any other form of accommodation, even mobile ones. A museum-hotel is a place for rest, relaxation, or work, where accommodation is offered in connection with a cultural offer of a high scientific standard. The idea is to allow guest-visitors to taste, touch, and live with what one can only observe in a museum. It requires the host to have the desire to impart knowledge.
What can you find in a Museum-Hotel?
The main elements expected in a museum-hotel are as follows: • A well-defined object: for example, the culture of North American Indian populations, or bourgeois domestic life in 1900. • Buildings or a natural or urban environment relevant to the subject of the museum-hotel, such as the Citadelle Vauban or Villa Bagatelle. • Authentic layouts, equipment, objects, a collection, close to their original state or restored according to the principles of the Venice Charter of 1964. • A set of scientific notices and explanations that help to understand the significance of what is presented: environment, garden, building, or object.
Two pieces from the collection
The Chauvin Collection gathers objects around three themes:
• Domestic life at the beginning of the 20th century,
• The reproduction of images and sound,
• Family office equipment.
The objects mostly come from treasures accumulated in attics over 4 or 5 generations by people who don’t know how to throw things away and have space.
The UNDERWOOD typewriter found in the "Chamber of Muses" is accompanied by a notice explaining that it was the favorite machine of Hemingway and Kerouac.
The Pygmophone turntable, a toy from the 1920s