Hôtel de Buet, Renaissance private mansion in Toulouse, France

The Hôtel de Buet, also called Hôtel de Guillaume de Bernuy, stands at 5 rue de la Pomme in Toulouse. Nicolas Bachelier built it between 1540 and 1544 as a two-storey house between courtyard and garden, with a straight staircase inside and a monumental stone portal marking its bay. Its windows carry carved masks and cut-leather motifs.

Guillaume de Bernuy, son of the woad merchant Jean de Bernuy, had this house built between 1540 and 1544 on a plot his father ceded to him, with Nicolas Bachelier as architect and sculptor. Bachelier had made his name in 1538 with the Hôtel de Bagis. The Buet family acquired the house after 1554, when Simon Buet, a parlement councillor, married Guillaume's daughter Marguerite; Guillaume had died in 1549. During the 1562 riots the building was badly damaged and needed considerable restoration.

The monumental stone portal on the courtyard side replaced the traditional staircase tower as the house's mark of honour, a device Nicolas Bachelier had already used at the Hôtel de Bagis in 1538. The window frames carry carved masks and grotesques modelled on the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau; Dominique Bachelier reused these masks on the consoles of the Hôtel d'Assézat passageway between 1560 and 1562.

The building sits on rue de la Pomme and remains a private residence with limited public access. Check during Heritage Days events if you want to look inside, as the property occasionally opens to visitors on those occasions.

The masks carved on the courtyard windows were reused as models: between 1560 and 1562 Dominique Bachelier, Nicolas's son, repeated them on the consoles of the passageway at the Hôtel d'Assézat. The hôtel is often confused with the better-known Hôtel de Bernuy, built for Guillaume's father Jean, the woad merchant.