The Beaux-Arts and Vauban's Citadelle

Maison Coilliot

The Art Nouveau house Hector Guimard built in Lille, a small façade of enamelled lava at 14 rue de Fleurus, raised between 1898 and 1900.

You're standing in front of a house that was built to be a billboard. Maison Coilliot, at 14 rue de Fleurus, is the Art Nouveau house Hector Guimard built in Lille, and it went up between 1898 and 1900 for Louis Coilliot, a ceramics merchant who sold a new material called enamelled lava. Guimard met him in 1897 at an exhibition of ceramics and the fire arts, and Coilliot asked for a façade that would advertise the product. Look at the street wall: the lava panels sit among cut stone and brick, and the lines curve and swell. The house has been a listed monument since 1977, but it is not open to the public, so everything worth seeing is right here on the street. When you're ready, walk north along rue de Fleurus toward the big classical building two streets up: that is the Palais des Beaux-Arts.

Hôtel Delbecque

The mansion at 105 Boulevard de la Liberté, listed for its façade alone.

You're standing where this walk first meets the boulevard. Boulevard de la Liberté was cut through in 1863, along the line of the demolished city ramparts, as part of Lille's remodelling under the Second Empire. It opened as the Boulevard de l'Impératrice, and it took the name Boulevard de la Liberté only in 1870, a few days after the Third Republic was proclaimed. It runs 1.6 kilometres dead straight, from the Boulevard Louis-XIV in the south-east to the Boulevard Vauban in the north-west, so the museum square you just left sits about halfway along it.

Now look at number 105, the Hôtel Delbecque, a late nineteenth-century hôtel particulier, a grand private townhouse. The Mérimée record names its architect as Vanderbergh, and the house has been listed since 9 December 1986. That protection covers the street façade only, which is fitting, because the façade is all anyone outside ever sees. The house is private, and the numbers fall as you walk north-west.