Bespoke finishes and interiors in Monaco

The dominant private typologies in the Principality are the leasehold apartment, the top-floor penthouse and the pied-à-terre — not the detached house. The consequence for detail is immediate: the first material constraint here is available thickness. Every centimetre taken by a screed, a lining or a suspended ceiling is paid for in ceiling height, and lost height is never recovered. We therefore settle very early what is surface-mounted, what sits in a rebate, what fits within the existing depth. A setting-out plan agreed before the first strip-out is worth more than a correction mid-works.

A significant part of the housing stock was built in the 1970s and 1980s, and the acoustic performance of that period falls below present expectations. In a fabric where dwellings adjoin on every face, above and below included, sound comfort is decided in the same centimetres as the finish. A floating screed, a lining on independent framing, a resilient joint around the perimeter of a floor: these are no longer visible once the work is delivered, but they decide what will be heard. We treat them as finishing work in their own right, not as a technical extra.

In the Principality, applications for consent are examined by an advisory committee which rules in the light of the laws and regulations, the aesthetic conditions of the proposed work, the general interest and its standing with regard to the history of Monaco. Aesthetics are therefore not a private judgement here: they form part of the examination. The inventory of architectural heritage further records some one hundred and ten buildings and forty-one remarkable façades, the mention “remarkable building” being the most binding degree as regards alteration. On a façade entered in that inventory, the design of a window is no longer a matter of material alone.

The building rules and the managing agent form a second level of constraint, distinct from administrative consent: hours, protection of common parts, booking of accesses. Deliveries to an upper-floor site pass through the lift, the goods lift and the stairwells, shared with residents. A marble slab, a full-height door, a single-piece kitchen worktop are therefore sized as much on the dimensions of the lift car as on those of the room. We survey these routes before ordering material — it is the only way to prevent a bespoke piece from becoming an impossible one to bring up.

No mineral resource is quarried on the territory: every material, stone and marble included, arrives by road through a dense street network. Surplus can be stored nowhere, and a veined material is chosen on the block before cutting, never by the square metre. On the seafront — Larvotto, the port, Fontvieille — salt deposition is direct: the atmosphere falls within categories C4 to C5 of ISO 9223. Period metalwork, ironmongery and balustrades are treated there in grades and protective systems intended for a marine environment.

Set against the relief and open due south, the site exposes its façades to intense sunlight and to wide differences of expansion between outer and inner faces — a floorboard, a veneered panel, a window fitted too tightly will say so in the end. Finishes therefore depend on what precedes them: on structural and general building work that sets the tolerances, on high-end renovation that fixes the volumes, on extensions and fit-outs that win a terrace or a top-floor level. The page we devote to Monaco brings these four crafts together.