Bespoke finishes and interiors in Cannes

La Croisette carries a built front of grand hotels of the Belle Époque and the interwar years, several of which are protected architectural landmarks. The decorative register of those hotels and of the holiday villas combines stucco and fibrous plaster, marble, ironwork and wrought joinery, at a scale and a level of finish proper to historic luxury hotel-keeping. That scale changes everything: a profile drawn for a twenty-metre hall does not transpose as it stands into an apartment drawing room. We redraw the profiles to the actual height of the room, failing which a correct scheme becomes an overwhelming one.

These works have in common that they are seen from afar as well as close to. A stucco of great height is judged first by its line, then by its grain; balcony ironwork is read from the promenade before it is touched. We therefore work both distances: the overall geometry, held to line and level, then the surface state, worked up by hand. Bespoke work here often consists in recovering an old rule of composition rather than in inventing a drawing. The rule recovered holds; the invented drawing dates.

Le Suquet belongs to an entirely different vocabulary: stone masonry, rendered façades, stepped lanes and narrow dimensions. Nothing of the register of the grand hotels applies there. Finishes are restrained — render that lets the wall be read, joinery of modest proportion, a simple floor — and it is precisely that restraint which demands the most accuracy. In fabric of that scale, an excess of noble material shows like a lapse of tone. We calibrate the level of finish on the house, never on what the neighbouring quarter would allow.

Le Suquet is a fabric of stepped lanes on the hill: machines have no access and supply is by hand carriage. Transportable size then becomes a design datum, on the same footing as the dimension of the room. A stone top, a door, a mirror, a single-piece element of joinery are surveyed along the route before being ordered. On La Croisette the difficulty is the reverse and quite as real: occupation of the highway is constrained by the calendar of events, and a delivery is set within slots.

The bay faces south and is widely open: sunlight and glare are at their maximum on the built front. That seafront therefore combines maximum saline exposure and strong solar glare, and exterior finishes age faster there than a few hundred metres back. On that front line, all metalwork and external joinery belong to marine-class protective systems. The point of La Croisette, exposed on several orientations, is the plainest case: nothing there is sheltered.

The hills of La Californie and Super Cannes, set back and at altitude, largely escape the salt deposition that strikes the seafront of the same commune: villas and properties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grounds, hairpin access. The same works there require less protection and more attention to the slope. Finishes moreover presuppose what carries them: structural and general building work that makes good the retaining walls, a high-end renovation that holds the brief, extensions and fit-outs that open the house onto the view. The page we devote to Cannes brings these four crafts together.