Hôtel de Besenval
The Hôtel de Besenval is a historic hôtel particulier in Paris with a cour d'honneur and a large English landscape garden, an architectural style commonly known as entre cour et jardin – meaning a residence between the entrance court in front of the building and the garden behind it. The building is listed as a historical monument by decree of 20 October 1928. It houses the Embassy of the Swiss Confederation and the residence of the Swiss ambassador to France since 1938. The premises are at 142 Rue de Grenelle in the district of Faubourg Saint-Germain in the 7th arrondissement, opposite the Hôtel du Châtelet and close to the Hôtel des Invalides. The Faubourg Saint-Germain has long been known as the favourite home of the French nobility and hosts numerous aristocratic hôtels particuliers. Many of these residences later became foreign embassies and ambassadorial residences or administrative headquarters of the City of Paris or seats of ministries of France. In the early 18th century, the French nobility started to move from the Marais, the then aristocratic district of Paris where nobles used to build their hotels particuliers, to the clearer, less populated and less polluted Faubourg Saint-Germain; an area which soon became the new residential area of France's highest ranking nobility. Families like those of the Duc d’Estrées, the Duc du Châtelet or the Duc de Noirmoutier moved there. Their former residences still bear their names today. Therefore, the instinct of the early investors was right when they bought at the beginning of the 18th century their plots of land on what would soon become one of the best addresses in Paris: The Rue de Grenelle. The origins of the Hôtel de Besenval go back to a single-floor residence, the Hôtel Chanac de Pompadour, erected in 1704 for a man of the Church, Abbé Pierre Chanac de Pompadour. The Abbé was a descendant of the family of Guillaume V de Chanac (1248–1348), Evêque de Paris from 1333 until 1342. For the design and the construction of his new residence, the Abbé commissioned the celebrated architect Pierre-Alexis Delamair.
