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Malouinières: the country houses of the Saint-Malo shipowners

A *malouinière* is the country house of a Saint-Malo shipowner, built out in the farmland behind the port, some dozen kilometres away, between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The survey run by the Inventaire général, the French national heritage survey, counted a hundred and twelve of them in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine: in the Clos-Poulet, the peninsula held between the river Rance, the English Channel and the marshes of Dol, and along the estuary. Two are classified as historic monuments, la Chipaudière and le Montmarin, the stronger form of protection under which the State must approve any work; some twenty more are registered, a lighter protection under which work must be declared. A handful can be visited. Most are still lived in, and closed.

A country house, not a manor

A malouinière is the country house of a merchant or a shipowner of Saint-Malo. The word itself is old: the French Ministry of Culture finds it in use from the very opening of the eighteenth century, and the historian Gilles Foucqueron credits it to Picot, the town's ingénieur ordinaire, its resident royal engineer, who is thought to have used it in 1703 where others still said "les malouines". The buildings came before the word: Château Doré, in Saint-Malo, is dated to the 1660s by the Mérimée database, the State's register of protected buildings.

A Breton manoir is the seat of a seigneurie, a lordship. It carries land, it carries rights, sometimes the power to hold a court, and its owner lives on it. A malouinière may well carry nothing of the sort. It is a second home, more often than not put up by a commoner grown rich on trade, occupied a few months of the year, and modelled not on the manor down the road but on the hôtel particulier, the private town mansion the same owner kept inside the walled city. The Inventaire général sums up the changeover in a phrase: the manors and fortified houses of the hinterland give way to country residences "generous in form without being ostentatious".

The substitution was often physical. Le Puits Sauvage stands on the remains of an older lordship; la Ville Bague on land the Magon de la Chipaudière family had held since 1695. Buying the land meant buying the rank that came with it, because only a noble estate carried the right to a colombier, the seigneurial dovecote, and to a chapel, the two of them standing at the entrance to the courtyard to state what the owner was.

These houses come in many styles, according to the use intended for them: from the smallest, nicknamed a little too easily vide-bouteilles, bottle-emptiers, though they were true houses of entertainment and pleasure, up to full French classical châteaux, sumptuous, and a measure of their owners' great fortunes.

The Limoëlou manor, a granite range with a stair turret and a well in the yard
The Limoëlou manor at Rothéneuf: the older type, gathered around its stair turret and its yard. Jacques Cartier bought this fifteenth-century farm in 1541 and remade it about 1545. Illustration
The malouinière du Bosc, a long classical front under a slate roof, seen from its garden
The malouinière du Bosc at Quelmer, built for the Magon family between 1715 and 1717 above the Rance: a hundred and seventy years later, the country house has taken the plan and the front of a classical château. Illustration

Where the money came from: cod, Cadiz, privateering, the South Sea

Four sources of profit follow one another and overlap. The first is cod. Fish was being dried on the Sillon, the beach outside the walls, as early as 1519; around 1535 Saint-Malo was fitting out twenty-five ships for Newfoundland; later it sent sixty to a hundred ships a year, taking three to four thousand men away for six months at a stretch. The dried cod sold beyond Gibraltar: at Alicante, at Civitavecchia from 1571, at Livorno and at Genoa.

The second is the Cadiz trade. Linen cloth woven at Quintin and at Loudéac was exchanged on the Spanish-American markets for silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru. Since the imperial monopoly kept the Americas for Spanish subjects, the men of Saint-Malo held the sea route instead, and the trading houses of Sanlúcar, then of Cadiz after 1600. Those firms bear the names of the families who did the building: Magon, Le Fer, Éon, Vincent. The historian André Lespagnol treats this Spanish trade, ahead of privateering, as the main base of the Saint-Malo fortunes.

The third is la course, privateering: private ships licensed by a royal commission to capture enemy vessels. Between 1689 and 1713 Saint-Malo fitted out around nine hundred privateering ventures, with a peak of seventy-five in the single year 1696.

The fourth is the shortest and the most profitable. In 1698 the shipowner Noël Danycan de l'Épine obtained the Compagnie royale de la mer du Sud, the royal South Sea company, which sold cloth straight to the settlers of Chile and Peru, going around the Spanish monopoly. From 1704-1705 the Malouins rounded Cape Horn as a matter of routine and loaded at Arica the silver of Potosí, brought down on muleback; the episode runs, in the main, from 1698 to 1717. The same shipowners worked the Pondicherry, Bengal and Mocha trades out of Saint-Malo from 1708 to 1719, until the Compagnie de Law, the state monopoly company created by the financier Law, took that privilege away from them.

These trades peak between 1690 and 1720, and the wave of building follows close behind: a fortune made at sea is a fragile thing, and land does not sink. François-Auguste Magon de la Lande, a director of the Compagnie des Indes orientales, the French East India Company, had la Chipaudière built between 1710 and 1720; his brother Luc began la Balue in 1715.

Twelve kilometres, and no further

The Clos-Poulet is the peninsula that carries Saint-Malo. Its name comes from Pou Alet, the pays d'Alet, the country of Alet, after the Gallo-Roman town that stood where Saint-Servan stands now. The Rance estuary closes it to the west, the English Channel to the north, the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel to the east and the marshes of Dol to the south; some ten parishes shared it between them.

Distance is the first constraint. The malouinières were built within a radius of twelve to fifteen kilometres of the town, under two hours on horseback, and less again for an owner who reached his house by the Rance. A shipowner had to be able to stand on the quay the day one of his ships was signalled, and behind the ramparts if the English fleet appeared, as it did in November 1693 and again in July 1695, without taking the town either time.

The opposite constraint pushed the same way. The walled town sits on a rock ringed with defences, where ground was counted in toises, the old French fathom of just under two metres, and there was room for neither garden nor orchard. The first country houses therefore went up in the nearest parishes, Paramé and Saint-Servan, before the series spread out over the rest of the peninsula, round the bay of Cancale and along both banks of the estuary.

One consequence catches visitors out: most malouinières turn their back on the sea. The country house is the reverse of the counting house, and its main room faces the fields. The Inventaire général records only a few exceptions, among them le Bosc, la Basse-Flourie, le Montmarin and Vaulérault. At la Verderie, in Saint-Servan, tradition has Noël Danycan watching from the top of his tower for his ships to come home.

The grammar of the malouinière

The plan is simple and it varies little. A rectangular main block, often extended by two low wings or by two pavilions, separates the entrance courtyard from the garden. The front is laid out in five or seven travées, the vertical files of windows and doors, and the odd number is what allows the middle one to be marked out. A rabine, an avenue lined with trees, runs up to the gate, and high walls close the whole thing in.

The materials speak of budget and of geology at once. The walls are schist rubble under a lime render; cut granite from Chausey is kept for the surrounds of windows and dormers, for the quoins at the angles, for the cornices and for the band that marks the upper floor. The roof is tall and steeply pitched, hipped on four sides, the triangular slopes taking the place of gables; it carries finials along the ridge and tall chimneystacks braced by buttressed shoulders. Up to the seventeenth century, openings were cut where the rooms wanted them; in the eighteenth they were aligned and symmetrical, as in military building.

The origin of the model is no mystery. Vauban, the king's commissioner general of fortifications, appointed Siméon Garangeau director of fortifications at Saint-Malo in 1691, a post he held until his death in 1741. The Inventaire général reports that la Chipaudière is traditionally credited to him, and sets the wholly military dryness of its exterior against the refinement of its interiors.

The outbuildings carry the social argument. The chapel allowed the family to hear mass at home; the one at la Ville Bague is half enclosed, with a second door opening to the people of the village. The colombier says more still. Article 389 of the coutume de Bretagne, the customary law of the duchy, barred any private person from building one unless he could show immemorial possession, or held three hundred journaux of nearby land as a fief or noble domain, a journal being the old measure of a day's ploughing. The number of boulins, the pigeon niches hollowed into the wall, had to be proportionate to the extent of the noble land. The scale varies from one source to the next: the owners of la Ville Bague reckon two boulins to the hectare, other texts one boulin to the half-arpent, and an arpent, an old land measure, runs from thirty-two to seventy-eight ares depending on the region. The proportion is settled; the rate is not. The birds brought in meat and colombine, droppings prized as manure, to the despair of every farmer nearby.

A two-storey house, pale rendered walls with dressed-stone surrounds, three dormers and tall chimney stacks on a hipped slate roof
Le Tertre Corbin at Dinard: on the left bank of the Rance, one of the earliest holiday houses in the town. It takes up the marks of the malouinière — openings framed in dressed stone, the rest of the walling rendered in lime, small dormers and a high hipped roof. Illustration
Le Valmarin, a pale-shuttered front at the end of a planted garden
Le Valmarin at Saint-Servan, built in the 1720s: the plan of a town house, between courtyard and garden, with the architecture of a malouinière. Illustration

A hundred and twelve, or two hundred, or three hundred

The figure in circulation is a hundred and twelve. It comes from a single piece of work, the Inventaire général survey published in 1984 under the title Les Malouinières, Ille-et-Vilaine. The booklet states that the distribution of the hundred and twelve malouinières recorded during the survey shows closeness to Saint-Malo to be the determining factor in where they stand. The departmental tourist board and the French Wikipedia article on the malouinière repeat the figure unchanged.

That figure counts the buildings standing and identified as malouinières on the date of the survey, not the buildings that were put up. Estimates of the number built disagree, and none of them rests on a published count. Gilles Henry, quoted by Wikipedia, offers close to two hundred. The association Cœur Émeraude speaks of two to three hundred having existed, of which perhaps a hundred still stand, ten or so of them large. La Demeure Historique, the association of private owners of protected buildings, is more careful and puts it at more than a hundred.

Part of the gap is destruction. The walled town of Saint-Malo was eighty per cent destroyed between 6 and 17 August 1944, and the country behind it was hit too. The protection order for le Puits Sauvage names what the bombing carried off there: the laundry, the gardeners' pavilions, a chimney, the design of the garden. The nineteenth century had already taken its share, pulling down or breaking up houses that had gone out of fashion. A malouinière that has gone appears in no inventory, and counting the survivors is not the same as counting what the shipowners built. Loss is not the only reason: a fair number of these houses have stayed anonymous and unrecorded, having slipped past every survey.

How the series ended, and what opens today

The golden age of malouinière building is conventionally taken to close in 1730. The Compagnie de Law took the India monopoly away from the men of Saint-Malo in 1719; the South Sea trade died out around 1717 as Spain pushed back; privateering grew riskier as the Royal Navy grew stronger; the French Revolution cut down the merchant elite, and the royalist conspiracy led by La Rouërie was uncovered in 1793 at la Fosse-Hingant. Houses still went up all the same: the Mérimée database dates the fitting out of le Puits Sauvage to 1746 and 1755, and le Montmarin was built in 1760.

The nineteenth century transformed more than it destroyed. At le Colombier, in Paramé, the house of the early eighteenth century was heavily reworked in the nineteenth, in a taste that looked back to the seventeenth. At Saint-Servan, the Magon de La Villehuchet family had a neo-Renaissance château put up in the third quarter of the century, with four round towers under conical caps: it carries the name of a malouinière without being one. Many houses were brought up to date in the wake of the seaside-resort style then in fashion, in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth: rooms rearranged, ornament added to fronts and roof ridges, windows widened.

The twentieth century brought the town out to its country houses. A good many of the malouinières closest to Saint-Malo were overtaken by building, and what one finds today varies widely from one house to the next: several now stand as islands of old fabric in the middle of recent housing estates, at Saint-Servan and at Paramé in particular.

Protection came late and unevenly. Twenty-four malouinières of the Saint-Malo country are protected as historic monuments, twenty-two of them in the Clos-Poulet alone. Two are classified, la Chipaudière in 1982 and le Montmarin in 1966. Classification is the stronger protection: the State must authorise any work. It does not always cover a whole house, and at la Chipaudière as at le Montmarin it is partial. The other twenty-two are registered, a lighter protection: work has to be declared, and anything done in the surroundings goes before the architecte des Bâtiments de France, the State architect who oversees the setting of protected buildings. Outside the Clos-Poulet, le Montmarin has been classified since 1966 for its buildings, its main courtyard and its terraces above the Rance, and since 1995 for the rest of its park.

Four places open outside the European Heritage Days. La Chipaudière runs guided tours from April to October. La Ville Bague opens from 1 April to the end of the Toussaint school holidays and again over the Christmas and winter holidays, closed on Wednesdays outside July and August. The gardens of le Montmarin, at Pleurtuit, hold the Jardin remarquable label and are visited on their own, without the house; the manoir de Limoëlou, at Rothéneuf, is a museum run by the town. Le Colombier has become a hotel and restaurant, la Ville-Huchet a campsite. For the others you have to wait for Rendez-vous à la malouinière, the open-house event started in 2019: fifteen houses opened in 2023, sixteen in 2024, fifteen in 2025, and the fifth edition has been put back from 2026 to 2027.

Twenty of these places in La Maplouine

The map holds more than 950 of them. Here are twenty that belong to this subject, with their commune and their category. Each one carries a full note in the map, in English and in French, geolocated and read on the spot.

La Maplouine gathers more than 950 geolocated notes across Saint-Malo, the Rance and the Clos-Poulet. It opens in Google Maps, with no account to create and no app to install, in English and in French.

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Questions La Maplouine answers

What is a malouinière?

It is the country house of a merchant or a shipowner of Saint-Malo, built inland between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. It served as a second home for a few months a year, and its architectural model was not the manor down the road but the hôtel particulier, the private town mansion the same owner occupied inside the walled city. The French Ministry of Culture finds the word in use from the beginning of the eighteenth century.

How many malouinières are left?

The figure of a hundred and twelve comes from the Inventaire général survey published in 1984, and it has been repeated ever since without being redone. It counts the buildings standing on that date, not the ones that were built. Estimates of the number built run from close to two hundred to three hundred depending on the author, with no published count behind them. The malouinières that were destroyed, among them those lost in 1944, appear in no tally at all.

Can you visit a malouinière?

Yes, but only a few. La Chipaudière, at Saint-Malo, and la Ville Bague, at Saint-Coulomb, run guided tours for much of the year. The gardens of le Montmarin, at Pleurtuit, are visited on their own. The manoir de Limoëlou is a museum run by the town. Le Colombier has become a hotel and restaurant, la Ville-Huchet a campsite. The rest open only for the European Heritage Days, in September, or for the Rendez-vous à la malouinière event.

Why are the malouinières grouped in the Clos-Poulet?

Because a shipowner had to be able to get back to the port within the day. They were built within a radius of twelve to fifteen kilometres of Saint-Malo, under two hours on horseback, and less again by the Rance. They also stayed within reach of the ramparts, where people took shelter when the English fleet appeared, as it did in November 1693 and in July 1695.

How do you recognise a malouinière?

By a rectangular main block with an odd number of travées, five or seven, often flanked by two low wings. The walls are schist rubble under lime render, with cut granite from Chausey kept for the surrounds, the angles and the band that marks the upper floor. The roof is tall and hipped on four sides, with tall chimneys braced by buttresses and dormers lined up over the windows below.

What was the colombier of a malouinière for?

For keeping pigeons, which gave meat and colombine, droppings used as manure. Above all it was a mark of rank. Article 389 of the coutume de Bretagne, the customary law of the duchy, kept the dovecote for whoever held three hundred journaux of land as a fief or noble domain, and the number of niches had to be proportionate to the extent of that land. The exact scale differs from one source to the next.

What is the difference between a malouinière and a Breton manor?

The manoir is the seat of a lordship: it carries rights, sometimes the power to hold a court, and its owner lives there. The malouinière is a pleasure house built by a commoner grown rich on sea trade, lived in on and off, and often put up on the site of a manor bought together with its land. That purchase brought the right to set up a colombier and a chapel, signs kept for noble estates.

Read next

History of Saint-MaloThe shipowners who had these houses built are the same men who fitted out for Newfoundland, for privateering and for the South Sea: the page on the history of Saint-Malo follows that run of fortunes from inside the walled town, from the ducal castle to the first stone of the rebuilding that followed the war.Daily life in the townWhy these families wanted out of the walled town makes more sense once you read what life was like in the crowded streets: the policing of refuse, the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, the health board of the port and the quarantine station on Cézembre.The RanceSeveral malouinières were reached by water rather than by road: the page on the Rance explains the tidal range that governed those journeys, the tide mills and the boatyards of the valley.
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