Which materials last over time on Cap d’Antibes?

The pine wood decides as much as the sea. Umbrella pines and Aleppo pines maintain permanent humidity and needle deposition — fouled roofs, biological growth on renders and stone, blocked drainage. On the headlands, A4 / 316L is the practicable minimum.

Can period decorative work be restored on Cap d’Antibes?

Yes, and the approach is read first in the period of the fabric. On north-facing façades, the dense shade of the parks slows drying and accentuates render defects: renewing external decorative work there means treating the cause before the material.

How do you protect the premises during the works on Cap d’Antibes?

Discretion here is a material constraint as much as an expectation: the properties of the Cap are among the most secluded on the Riviera coast, with no intervisibility between them. The coastal path nonetheless runs around it — works are visible from public space.

Expertise · Cap d’Antibes

Bespoke finishes and interiors on Cap d’Antibes

Marble, fine woods, plasterwork and metal: detail elevated to an art form and shaped by hand. We bring this expertise to exceptional residences on Cap d’Antibes, with the discretion and rigour for which we are known.

From the Cap to La Garoupe, we work at the finest addresses on Cap d’Antibes — a limited number of sites, carried through to perfection.

Marble, fine woods, plasterwork, fine metalwork: on Cap d’Antibes, the finish is on the scale of villas of exception. Every work is crafted and laid by hand.

Solid-stone bathrooms, bespoke libraries and dressing rooms, invisible integration of the technical systems: detail in the service of grand estates.

What the pine wood does to the exterior finishes of a villa

The pine wood is the dominant landscape material of the Cap: umbrella pines and Aleppo pines structure the grounds, and that is not without effect on the buildings. The canopy maintains permanent humidity and a permanent fall of needles — soiling of roofs, biological growth on renders and stone, blocking of drainage. An exterior finish conceived here without regard to the trees is a finish to be done again. We choose surface states that can be cleaned, edges that do not retain needles, drainage sized for what actually falls, season after season.

The dense shade of the grounds slows the drying of north-facing façades, which accentuates render defects on those orientations. The same product, the same colour, the same application therefore do not give the same result on two faces of one villa. We separate the systems by orientation: more open permeability and a matt finish on the shaded side, where water must leave; treatment of glare on the south side, where it is light that wears. A survey of sunlight taken in two seasons is worth more than an assumption made on a drawing.

Architect-designed villas: a century of registers to tell apart

The holiday fabric of the Cap runs from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth: villas for winter visitors first, then architect-designed villas of the interwar and post-war years. These are three hands, and three ways of finishing. A winter visitor’s villa expects mouldings, old floors, wrought ironwork; an interwar villa expects sharp arrises, taut renders, slender joinery. Bespoke work here consists in knowing which century the house belongs to before knowing what would suit it. We document the period before drawing the detail.

The heart of the Cap gathers large properties enclosed in wooded grounds, served by narrow roads. On the summit plateau, the Notre-Dame quarter is listed as a site by an order of 3 May 1913, motivated by the conservation of panoramic views. The protections in force apply to precise perimeters: we check case by case what applies to a given plot, without extending to the whole sector what holds only for a part. It is the only honest way of speaking about consent before a file has been examined.

From the points to the plateau: two levels of protection for metal

On the points of the Cap, external metalwork belongs to marine class: A4 / 316L is the practicable minimum there. Those points are exposed on several orientations, whereas the heart of the plateau, protected by the pines, enjoys a markedly more sheltered regime. Two pieces of work in the same sector therefore do not call for the same protection. We do not size to the most severe case for comfort: we survey the real exposure, then we choose — grade, surface treatment, and fixings of the same grade as the piece, this last point being the one most often forgotten.

Cap d’Antibes is a sector of the commune of Antibes, not an autonomous commune: rules are not uniform there from one plot to the next, which is one more reason to examine each address separately. Finishes never go alone in any case. They presuppose structural and general building work that sets the tolerances, a high-end renovation that fixes the brief, extensions and fit-outs that carry the villa into its grounds. The page we devote to Cap d’Antibes brings these four crafts together.