Bespoke finishes and interiors in Èze

The finishing vocabulary of the village is that of exposed stone, thin render and vaults — a sober register, bearing no comparison with the decoration of the holiday villas along the coast. Here a finish does not add: it reveals. Thin render lets the bond be read behind it, a vault gives itself for what it is, a floor follows the fall it has always had. The right gesture consists in removing what has been added over the decades rather than in laying something new. It is patient work, and it is judged from very close.

The medieval core is perched on a rocky spur: stepped stone houses, cobbled ramps, lanes that climb. Levels are never aligned from one house to the next, openings are few and small, and light enters at only a handful of points. A light finish gains here what a dark one would lose, and the setting-out of a floor follows the actual grid of the walls, never a theoretical axis. We record the out-of-plumbs before drawing: in this fabric, the correction always shows more than the original defect.

The commune’s shoreline takes direct salt deposition; the village, several hundred metres above, is far less exposed. Two pieces of work in one commune therefore call neither for the same metal grades nor for the same protective systems. In the seaside sector, at the foot of the cliff, ironwork, ironmongery and fixings are chosen for a frankly marine environment. In the village the dominant question is no longer salt but the humidity of the rock and the thermal range. Transposing one onto the other means oversizing on one side and undersizing on the other.

Stone fabric in permanent contact with the rock and the ground presents a risk of capillary rise at the foot of walls. That is the constraint which governs the choice of interior finishes in the village: a closed covering traps what the masonry must be able to give back. We therefore work with vapour-permeable materials, we reserve timber skirtings for sound locations, and we leave the foot of the wall a means of evaporation. It is not a precaution of principle: it is the difference between work that holds for ten years and work to be done again in the third winter.

The village is entirely pedestrian: no vehicle circulates in it. Supplies, removals and equipment go up and down the same lanes and the same stairs, carried by hand. No storage area is available in the immediate vicinity of the works: phasing is therefore set on split deliveries, in the exact order of installation. For bespoke work this shifts the design: a cabinet is drawn in transportable elements assembled on site, stone is cut to the size that passes, a frame is conceived to be taken apart. The drawing follows the route.

The high point of the commune, on the upper corniche, opens further positions still — commanding, steeply falling, with their own accesses. Whatever the sector, detail presupposes what precedes it: structural and general building work that makes the foot of the wall sound, a high-end renovation that fixes the approach, extensions and fit-outs that win a terrace on the slope. The page we devote to Èze brings these four crafts together.