Hôtel Gabriel
buildings in Lorient, France
The Hôtel Gabriel is a group of 18th-century buildings located in the Peristyle in Lorient, France. Designed by Jacques Gabriel, it was commissioned by the Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes to build an auction house for its merchandise.
The two pavilions are built symmetrically and in a classical style. They are located on either side of a main courtyard, surrounded to the south by a two-hectare French garden, and to the north by a parade ground. Destroyed by Allied air action during World War II, it was rebuilt identically between 1956 and 1959.
Reclaimed by the Royal Navy in 1770 after the dissolution of the Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes, it was used by its staff for almost two centuries. In 2008, the municipality of Lorient bought the buildings and installed its archives and architecture and heritage services.
History
Early plans for the Compagnie des Indes
The city of Lorient experienced a major boom in 1719, when John Law de Lauriston created the Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes by purchasing several other trading companies, and chose the city as his base of operations. The Royal Navy, which then occupied the city's maritime facilities, was reluctant to let the new company use the facilities in the harbor enclosure, but on June 28, 1719, the Conseil de la Marine ordered it to vacate the premises, which it did by the end of the same year. In 1732, the Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes decided to transfer the headquarters of all its sales from Nantes to Lorient, thus requiring the construction of new facilities to accommodate buyers.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3145497. Authority coordinates are 47.746, -3.355. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1959, 1770 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hôtel Gabriel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.