Bespoke finishes and interiors in Beaulieu-sur-Mer

The commune retains a Belle Époque built ensemble — holiday villas, hotels and leisure buildings — inherited from its vocation as a winter resort. The local decorative register combines marble, stucco and fibrous plaster, mosaic, ironwork and old floors. The Villa Kérylos is its documented example, open to visit on site: built between 1902 and 1908 by the architect Emmanuel-Elisée Pontremoli for the historian and archaeologist Théodore Reinach, it reconstitutes a Greek house of the Hellenistic period adapted to the comfort of its own time. There one measures the standard in materials that local villégiature set for itself.

The twelve monolithic columns of its peristyle are of white Carrara marble. A monolith is not an assembly: it cannot be corrected, it can only be chosen. That is exactly what we ask of solid stone work — that the block be settled before cutting, that the veining run on from one element to the next, that joints fall where the drawing expects them. On a mosaic or a preserved old floor the gesture is the reverse: record, lift in numbered panels, relay. None of this can be improvised at the end of a job.

The bay is among the best sheltered on the Riviera coast: the La Petite Afrique quarter owes its name to the particularly mild microclimate given it by the screen of the cliffs. That shelter is real and it shows — exotic planting, façades ageing slowly on the protected side. It does not, however, remove salt deposition: the built part of the commune lies entirely within five hundred metres of the shore, and so remains in a marine atmosphere within the meaning of ISO 9223. An external metal element is sized to marine class there, sheltered or not.

The seafront cove where the Villa Kérylos stands is, for its part, in direct maritime exposure: no screen at all. Within one commune, two properties a few hundred metres apart therefore do not call for the same protective systems on metalwork, external joinery and ironmongery. We do not transpose from one address to another. A survey of exposure — orientation, screening, distance to the shore, prevailing wind — precedes the choice of grades and exterior finishes. It fits on one page, and it is what separates work that holds from work to be done again.

Old holiday building here combines two factors: the age of the fabric, often a century old, and the permanent saline exposure of a seafront without screening. On substrates of that age the question is not only aesthetic — it is one of compatibility. Too closed a render on old masonry, a modern adhesive on a mosaic, a film-forming varnish on century-old timber: three ways of gaining two years and losing twenty. We choose materials for what they let the substrate do, not only for what they give to be seen.

The harbour district, with its tight fabric and its two ports, imposes a third regime: little distance, façades seen close to, shared accesses. A moulding is judged there at a metre, a stone joint at thirty centimetres, and distance forgives nothing. There as elsewhere, finishes presuppose what carries them — structural and general building work brought back to plumb, a high-end renovation that decides the brief, extensions and fit-outs that return the house to its garden. The page we devote to Beaulieu-sur-Mer brings these four crafts together.