La Serre Michelin (tropical greenhouse at Michelin's headquarters)

The Carmes site is where Michelin began. According to the press kit of the architects of La Canopée, the firm's industrial story started there in 1889, on the banks of the Tiretaine, whose water power justified the choice of location, and no fewer than twenty hectares were developed there over time. Regional tourism pages add that the Barbier et Daubrée firm, founded in 1832, took the name Michelin et Cie in 1889 under the brothers André and Édouard Michelin, and that the headquarters has never left the site.

Historically reserved for employees alone, that headquarters houses a tropical greenhouse devoted to the rubber tree, the raw material of rubber; Wikipedia notes that Michelin decided in 1925 to set up rubber plantations in Vietnam. The press kit mentions a monumental greenhouse raised on the forecourt "in the 2000s".

In 2015 a major architecture competition was launched to renovate the headquarters' reception. The greenhouse, whose future the architects describe as uncertain, was then kept and folded into La Canopée, designed in 2016-2018 by Encore Heureux and Construire. Works began in June 2018 with the contractor Léon Grosse and ended in 2021, with the joint inauguration of the building and of the new Place des Carmes. On that occasion the site opened its shop, café and greenhouse to the public, the last as a guided visit run by L'Aventure Michelin.

The greenhouse stands at the entrance of the site, in contact with the reception building, which the architects kept to two storeys so as not to hide the historic buildings behind it. According to one travel site, it is a volume of large glass panels held by a metal frame, crossed by winding walkways that link several sections and built to shelter tropical plants from the local cold. The cadastral outline reproduced in OpenStreetMap gives it an irregular footprint of about 430 m².

In the 2018-2021 project the greenhouse was not demolished but folded into the overall composition: the press kit presents it as the emblem of the rehabilitated factory and says it carries the complex's large sign. It also lists "all the glazing of the greenhouse" of the reception building among the reused elements, part of that glass having been re-laid on site as partitions for meeting rooms; it does not detail what was redone or kept on the greenhouse itself. The Café Equateur and the greenhouse look onto each other, according to the captions of the photographs in the press kit.

The route is built around the rubber tree, or hevea, and the introductory film traces its cycle from seed to latex production. Michelin's own presentation describes the greenhouse as a sample of the species that grow in rubber-growing regions; the official pages name, besides the hevea, pineapple, coffee, cassava and cocoa.

An immersive film on the hevea comes before the walk, and the presentation stresses that rubber has transformed everyday life. Once the greenhouse has been toured, the Café Equateur offers tastings of exotic products, for example Bahia chocolate and Indonesian coconut, which extend the theme of tropical crops.

The greenhouse stands at the entrance of Michelin's headquarters on Place des Carmes-Déchaux, served by tram line A (stop Les Carmes). It opens only with a guide, for a visit of about an hour and a half booked online: an immersive film on the hevea, a walk through the greenhouse, then a tasting at the Café Equateur; visits are offered in French and English.

The company museum, L'Aventure Michelin, is at another address on rue du Clos-Four, with a 2,000 m² route counted at 1.5 to 2 hours. The Place des Carmes, redesigned with La Canopée (two and a half hectares of additional public space, with a fountain and a play area), is freely accessible; the chapel of the former Discalced Carmelite convent opens there during European Heritage Days.