Empire slates building

L'un des plus somptueux hôtels du monde vient d'être inauguré à Paris. Le Peninsula, propriété de deux consortiums asiatiques, a demandé six ans de préparation et de travaux. Au nombre de ceux-ci figurent les toitures de l'hôtel entièrement recourvertes par les défuntes ardoises d'Angers Trélazé.

After four years of works, themselves arrived after two years of preparation, one of the most finest hotels of the world has been opened in Paris on August 1st. Two Asian groups have invested around 900 millions euros in the complete renovation and settings of the Peninsula hotel including 200 rooms combining the latest communication technologies and the finest hand-made know-how. Among those there are the famous and now deceased Angers-Trélazé slates.

One part of the roof of the Peninsula, located on Kleber avenue, has been completely renovated while
another part has been created, both with the slates sold by the centenary company Ardoisières d'Angers, making the new roof absolutely identical to the original one, set in 1908. The Angers-Trélazé mine has been definitively closed because of the exhaustion of raw materials. Only some veins would be preserved for the restoration of official buildings. So the Peninsula hotels is one of the latest buildings to be covered with Angers-Trélazé slates.


About 100,000 slates have been necessary to constitue the roof. Some of them have been hand-carved like scales of fish in order to fit with the shapes and the curbs of the structure. And  sprinkled blue and white bricks of the L'Oiseau blanc courtyard have been themselves be produced by an Anjou company.