Like many another quaint Norman town, Louviers was typical for the halftimbered houses and shops that leaned with precarious medieval charm over its cobblestone streets, a small and pleasantly situated industrial town. But by its enchanting site on twenty-one shallow branches of the river Eure, Louviers distinguished itself from other Norman towns, the factories of its flourishing textile trade straddling those streams in the manner of an industrial Venice.

The modest home of the Duruflé family stood at the northeast edge of town, at 59, rue du Quai, next to a café, where several streams of the river converge on their way north to the Seine. Charles and Marie-Mathilde lived there with their sons Henri, Marcel, and Maurice. Across the street from the family's nondescript two-story row house, which stood directly on the street, was a grocery store, and next to it a butcher. The train station was a five-minute walk from their home, eastward across the river.

The late-medieval church of Notre-Dame was the architectural and religious heart of town and was the church attended by the Duruflé family. The edifice stands just a few blocks south of their home, its squat tower visible from their front door, and has a sense of grandeur that belies its relatively small size. A tower originally stood above the crossing, but when Maurice was nearly four years old it was felled by a serious storm. The ravages of time and the bombardments of war have blackened the whitish stone; its north side is tinted green with moss, and its south yellowed by the sun. The stonework of the exterior south flank is riotously ornate, the product of its late gothic aesthetic. It was in this church that Maurice Duruflé discovered his vocation as a musician.

Astride one of the Eure's streams a block east of the church is the old convent of the Pénitents de Saint François, constructed in 1646 as a Franciscan monastery. It was closed during the Revolution but subsequently housed a boys’ school and then a prison. Today it is the home for the École municipal de Musique Maurice Duruflé, established in the 1980s.