A silk workshop on rue Burdeau, 1831

In the nineteenth century the Croix-Rousse wove Lyon's silk. The canuts, the silk weavers, settled on the slopes, in buildings made for looms. In 1831, the year this one was finished, they rose up to be paid properly.

The Jacquard loom was enormous: nearly four metres tall, and it needed daylight. Hence the ceilings, hence windows of almost two metres. Those proportions are what make the rooms, and they can't be faked in a new build.

The ground floor was the workshop. It's now Navette's dining room, with the original beams and the floor it always had. We cleaned it; we didn't replace it.

A traboule runs along the side of the building: a covered passage cutting through from one street to the next, built to carry silk out of the rain. Guests use it to reach the courtyard. It's the kind of detail that exists nowhere else.