Immeuble Duthoo, Art Nouveau revenue house in Tours, France

The Immeuble Duthoo is a row of six adjoining dwellings at 42–50 bis rue Jules-Charpentier, built on reinforced-concrete frames. Each unit has its own entrance, and a central double porch opens onto an inner courtyard with small gardens. The facades follow the street's concave curve, broken by full-height bow windows above the ground floor, and a balustrade runs around the four-sided roof.

Arthur Duthoo, son of a nurseryman from Auxerre, founded the Grand Bazar on Rue Nationale in Tours in 1888; the store became Nouvelles Galeries in 1897. In 1905 he bought land between Rue Jules-Charpentier and Boulevard Béranger to house some of his employees. The architect Jean-Frédéric Wielhorski, a former pupil of Victor Laloux and municipal architect of Tours from 1906 to 1913, drew the plans, and construction ran from 1907 to 1910.

The facade tiles were made by Gentil et Bourdet of Boulogne-Billancourt, a ceramics firm whose founders Alphonse Gentil and François-Eugène Bourdet had studied under Victor Laloux, like the architect Wielhorski. Brown, green and blue glazed stoneware runs in long vertical bands, frames the windows on a white ground, and forms stylised horse-chestnut leaves and fruit above the entrance doors and under the roof cornices.

The six entrances and the double porch open directly onto the southern side of Rue Jules-Charpentier, whose concave curve lets you take in the whole 35-metre frontage from the opposite pavement. The building is a private residence, so the courtyard and garden plots are not open to visitors; the ceramic panels are best examined from street level, where the entrance doorways and the bands under the roof cornices are within easy view.

The building combines Art Nouveau elements like stylized leaves and fruits with emerging geometric patterns characteristic of Art Deco. This blend marks a transitional moment when designers were shifting from organic to geometric forms in architectural decoration.