I wasn’t sure what to expect when I pointed my rented Citroën C3 toward the Manoir de l’Automobile museum in the northwestern part of France. I’d heard great things about the museum from several contacts whose opinion I trust, so I figured that I’d find at least a few cars worth shooting, but I also kind of assumed the GPS screaming over the coarse three-cylinder was taking me to a small-town museum.
To quote the punk band Social Distortion: I was wrong. I’ve visited dozens of car museums all over the world, so it takes a lot to impress me, and the Manoir de l’Automobile blew my mind. The place has an engine chapel! It’s a small, round room with tall ceilings, car-themed stained-glass windows, and nearly 20 engines from the past couple of decades arranged in a circle. In the middle of the room there’s a huge, 9.1-liter straight-six built by Renault in 1924, and the long hallway leading to it is lined with more than 30 old outboard motors. It’s a real chapel, too; it was dismantled from a nearby castle and rebuilt in the museum one stone at a time.
But let’s shift into reverse for a second. The museum is located in Lohéac, which is a small, sleepy village nestled in the countryside roughly an hour away from Rennes in Brittany. Approximately 800 people live there, surrounded by fields and forests. I drove in at about 1:30 p.m. on a Friday and found quaint old buildings, totally empty streets, and not much else. It almost felt like I was driving through a movie set.
The authentic small-town vibe is part of what attracted French enthusiast, businessman, race car driver, and, later, car manufacturer Michel Hommell to Lohéac in the 1970s. At the time, he lived in Paris and ran a publishing empire he had built from the ground up. Its portfolio of titles notably included a magazine dedicated to racing called Échappement, which is still around today. The hustle and bustle of Parisian life led him to start looking for a place in the countryside where he could go to unwind on the weekends. He found his dream house in Lohéac, and he later bought a farm on the outskirts of town. He got the idea of turning the farm into a museum after he started giving private tours of the car collection he kept there.
The museum opened its doors in 1988 and has been expanded several times since. Today, more than 400 cars are scattered across 161,000 square feet of floor space. The usual suspects are all there. The first cars you see after walking in are prewar models, like an 1888 De Dion Bouton Type L and a 1914 Ford Model T. Exotics are part of the mix, too, including a Lamborghini Countach and a handful of Rolls-Royces, but you can check out sleek-looking Italian supercars and massive British luxury cars in just about every museum on the planet. The issue with a lot of car museums, in my opinion, is that they feel like walking through one of those mundane “the 100 greatest cars of the 21st century” books. Hommell’s museum rightfully honors these cars while focusing on the odd, the underappreciated, and the unknown.
Where else can you see an amphibious, Ford V-8-powered three-wheeler called the Hydromobile and built in 1942? Nowhere; it’s a one-off. Two cars down, there’s another obscure amphibious car made by a French brand called Hobbycar. The VELAM Isetta-based single-seater that set numerous speed records in 1957 is parked just a few cars away from the first 1989 MVS Venturi 260 ever built. There’s also a Renault 3, which was a budget-friendly alternative to the 4 sold in tiny numbers, and a Citroën Pony, which was a 2CV-derived model developed and built in Greece. Jacky Ickx’s Lada Niva rally car from the Pharaohs Rally is upstairs, next to the Volkswagen Race Touareg that Carlos Sainz drove to victory in the 2010 Paris-Dakar Rally.
Cast in that light, a Mercedes-Benz 500E is a little vanilla, isn’t it?
The museum is like a maze, and it never ends. You walk out of a room, think “daaamn, that was amazing,” and you step into another room with even cooler cars. There’s a theme to it all. The various Alpine models are lumped together in chronological order on the same row, the Formula 1 cars are arranged to look like they’re on a Grand Prix starting grid, the rally cars are parked together, and there’s a fascinating display that highlights Hommell’s own cars, including the first prototype from the 1992 Paris auto show.
Hommell’s stint as a manufacturer deserves its own story, but it’s worth summing up here. According to Christian Courtel, Hommell’s biographer, the project started in February 1990. Hommell was having lunch at a restaurant in central Paris with a group of friends that included Jean-Charles Rédélé, the son of Alpine founder Jean Rédélé, and the conversation pivoted from business to cars. One pointed out that the light, sporty two-seater like the Alpine A110 was dead. Hommell replied that it’d be really cool to resurrect it.
Against a great many odds, he did. The first prototype made its debut two years later at the 1992 Paris auto show, and the new brand went home from the event with 12 paid orders. The problem was that Hommell never envisioned the coupe as a production model. In fact, h only planned to build six cars: one to use as a test mule, one to display in the museum, one for homologation, one for him, and the remaining two for friends who were also involved in the project. Not one to back down from a challenge, however, he set up a factory in Lohéac and delivered the first car in August 1994. The company ultimately released four models, called Berlinette Echappement, Barquette, RS, and RS2, respectively, and it closed in 2003 after building 242 cars.
Beyond the cars, the memorabilia displayed in the museum is impressive as well. There’s an entire section dedicated to scale models of all sizes and from all eras. Hundreds of classic dealership signs line the walls, and there are countless vintage objects displayed, including tools, televisions, cookware, and furniture. It’s a museum that has a soul; you can tell that an enormous amount of passion went into putting it together.
I’d planned to spend about an hour in the museum. I ended up walking around for four hours.
See More!
Malta Classic Car Museum: Big Fun in a Tiny Country
Honda Reopened Its Museum in Japan, and It Looks Stunning
World’s most unusual cars ever made, found in one warehouse | Barn Find Hunter
