In Lyon, the Villa Lumière is the last surviving testimony of the social rise and fantastic industrial success of Antoine Lumière, painter and photographer, and of his two older sons, Auguste and Louis, inventors of the Cinématographe.

The Lumières’ venture

Antoine Lumière - 1895

The Lumière family arrived in Lyon in 1870. The rue de la Barre photographic studio set up initially in a timber hut and later in a permanent building with a display window and reception room became a fashionable place frequented by many artists, politicians and scientists.
Auguste and Louis very soon shared their father’s work. Indeed, at the tender age of 17, Louis’ first invention would mark the start of their industrial venture and fortune: he designed a gelatin-bromide plate allowing the photographic snapshot. This photographic plate, manufactured initially on a small scale and marketed in a box featuring a blue label (“Etiquette Bleue”), immediately proved a success, which prompted transition to industrial production. A factory was therefore built in the east of the city in 1882.

Company development did not prevent the two brothers from pursuing their research in various fields and especially that of the motion picture. In February 1895, Louis patented an appliance which he called the Cinématographe Lumière and in which he used a flexible transparent film strip with regularly perforated edges : the cinema was born.

Lumière builders

Auguste Lumière wrote in his memoirs,
" My father had a mania for bricks and mortar... carried away by the success of our enterprise, he soon acquired a property at La Ciotat, on which he constructed a large beautiful mansion, then planted a vineyard to which he added colossal wine cellars ; he built other mansions at Evian, la Turbie and finally at Monplaisir... ".

The Château Lumière, as it was called from the start by the local inhabitants, is Antoine Lumière’s ultimate architectural creation. Following the example of many Lyon industrialists, such as car manufacturers Rochet and Schneider or Marius Berliet, he had an imposing mansion built on the outskirts of Lyon; a house which was both comfortable and close to the Lumière workshops. Designed by the Lyon architects Alex and Boucher and built between 1899 and 1902, it features impressively luxurious decoration in which " Art Nouveau " leanings find expression.

Détail du toît de la VIlla Lumière

The architects’ design featured a massed, almost square, building plan, outside which only the vehicle accessway projects to the north. Splitting of volumes and variety of elevations contrast with this symmetrical plan. The architectural effect lies in the proportions of its outlines and in the interplay of materials, colors and ornamentation.
The variety of materials contributes to the polychromatic effect : the white limestone of balusters, terraces and balconies, the gray limestone of the string courses and cornices, the bricks and white stone of the dormer windows and chimney stacks, the varnished enameled tuiles en écaille (scale-shaped plain roof tiles), the zinc of the ridge cappings and finials, the steel, glass and tile ceramic of the magnificent conservatory.

> The building incorporates various sections of different height roughly corresponding to its internal layout. The complexity of its masses is further accentuated by the interplay of its steeply sloping pavilion roofs, alternating with flat roofs edged with balustrades.
On the northern side, subtle interplay of solids and cavities produces an effect of verticality : the elevation, against which the conservatory is built, is transpierced over a 2-floor height by a huge bay window, whose top is cunningly revealed by an inclined squinch built into the roof. On the northern side, subtle interplay of solids and cavities produces an effect of verticality : the elevation, against which the conservatory is built, is transpierced over a 2-floor height by a huge bay window, whose top is cunningly revealed by an inclined squinch built into the roof.

	The fully glazed conservatory occupies the north-west corner of the mansion. Its steel frame is supported on a " mosaic-bonded " limestone base. The external décor remains sober : a highly colored ceramic frieze only runs around the head of the glazed elevations.

Interiors

The internal layout remains conventional : a basement for domestic services, a ground floor for reception purposes, two main upper floors for family apartments and an attic floor for servants rooms. The effect of surprise is caused by the out-of-scale volume of the painting studio, which extends the height of the two top floors of the mansion’s central section. The ground floor is arranged around the large central staircase and entrance hall, with the drawing room straight ahead, the kitchen and dining room to the right, the billiard room and conservatory to the left. Conventionally, the drawing room occupies the center of the house, but the novelty stems from its opening into an internal gallery featuring large bay windows. The gallery provides access at one end to the dining room and at the other end to the billiard room.

The outstanding feature of the grand staircase is the monumental cock carved in the round to form the newel at the foot of the banister : this animal signals the arrival of daybreak and thus of light and its representation just inside the entrance to the house is undoubtedly symbolic > The grand staircase   Eugène-Benoît Baudin elaborated a freely-worked painted décor over the full height of the stairwell, into which daylight enters through a bay window which has unfortunately lost its original mottled and patterned glass panes. The composition incorporates empty areas and the hanging flowers do not mingle with the row of Indian corn depicted on the lower part of the walls. Tradition has it that a farmyard caricaturing members of the family did in fact complement the plant motifs but, in 1978, the restorer could only reveal a few stenciled outlines ; on the other hand, he did find the billiard balls painted on the ceiling and depicting one of the favorite pastimes of the master of the house. .
Two sides of the room are fully glazed but only the transom windows have survived to this day ; an autochrome photograph taken at the turn of the 20th-century bears witness to the fluidity of pattern and colorful harmony of the stained glasswork.

Antoine Lumière called on Lyon artists, some of whom were friends : the sculptor Pierre Devaux, who had already worked for him at Evian, the painter Eugène-Benoît Baudin, specialized in floral work and a keen photographer, the wood carver G. Cave. The decorative quest focused mainly on the ground floor rooms.

Although designed as the family home, this mansion was in fact only occupied for a few years by Jeanne-Joséphine Lumière, Antoine’s wife.
It only became the property of the Société Lumière company in 1950, but had already housed its headquarters and offices for a number of years. When the City of Lyon purchased the mansion and its grounds in 1975, the interior was partitioned and its décor concealed. A major scheme was then launched enabling the volume and, where possible, the original décor of its rooms to be restored. During a second scheme, its roofs were fully restored and regained their initial polychromy. Floodlighting (subsidized in 1993 by the Caisse des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, the French national heritage fund ) highlights the mansion’s restored elevations unveiled thanks to the laying out of a 7000 m_ park. The entire mansion is listed on the Inventaire Supplémentaire des Monuments Historiques (= UK Grade II-listed historic building) by a May 20th 1986 conservation order and the " Hangar " transit shed, which featured in the first film, was granted a classification order on December 2nd 1994 prior to restoration and integration in the new Institut Lumière cinema facility in 1998.