Bespoke finishes and interiors in Nice

The interior decoration of the bourgeois apartment blocks here belongs to fibrous plaster and moulded plasterwork, parquet, marble fireplaces and small-paned joinery. It is a coherent whole, drawn at a time when the profile of a cornice answered the height of the room. Plaster decoration is also the first thing lost in the successive renovations of an apartment: knocked off, lined over, drowned under coats. Its restitution requires a survey before removal — impression, gauge, profile run to a template — and not a reconstruction after the fact from a catalogue. That is the difference between a cornice and a decorative scheme.

The city was inscribed on 27 July 2021 on the UNESCO World Heritage list under the title “Nice, Winter Resort Town of the Riviera”, under criterion (ii). The inscription records the fusion of British, Italian, French and Russian influences, which produced a diversity of architectural styles and decoration expressing the cosmopolitan character of the winter resort. This is no abstraction for anyone restoring: within one building in the bourgeois heart, a profile may follow an Italian model and a window a British usage. Identifying the source of the decoration comes before the gesture.

The safeguarding and enhancement plan for Vieux-Nice was approved by decree of 17 December 1993 and amended by decree of 22 October 1997: it is that document, and not the metropolitan local plan alone, which governs works within its perimeter. It descends to the level of detail — that is its purpose. On a façade, a window, a coping, the question is therefore not only what would be handsome, but what the document prescribes. We start from there, and we discuss it before committing to the least order of material.

The decoration there is Italian rather than French: génoise courses crowning façades, génoise ceilings inside, painted render and trompe-l’œil in which surrounds, rustication and mouldings are painted rather than carved. Reworking a trompe-l’œil is the work of a decorative painter, not of a renderer: the layout must be recorded, the feigned light recovered, and the cast shadow made consistent with the true orientation of the façade. A flat area in place of modelling shows from the street opposite. The fabric itself is closed to vehicles: supply is by hand carriage or within regulated delivery slots.

The Promenade des Anglais and the quai des États-Unis form a directly exposed seafront: façades and joinery there take salt deposition, whereas the hills of Cimiez, a few kilometres away, are largely spared it. The same element — balcony metalwork, external joinery, ironmongery — has neither the same life nor the same need of protection. On the villégiature hills, Mont Boron overlooking the sea and Les Baumettes to the west, it is fall and orientation that govern, not salt.

In the central buildings, historic stairwells and their balustrades are protected works in themselves: protecting them during the job is an item in its own right, on the same footing as hand carriage. Finishes finally presuppose what precedes them: structural and general building work that gives back the levels, a high-end renovation that fixes the approach, extensions and fit-outs that recompose the plan. The page we devote to Nice brings these four crafts together.