Bespoke finishes and interiors in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

The peninsula holds a body of holiday villas built for an international clientele between the end of the nineteenth century and the interwar years. The decorative vocabulary of that fabric is recognisable: marble, fibrous plaster and stucco, wrought ironwork, small-paned joinery. The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, known as the Villa Île-de-France, raised between 1905 and 1912 in a neo-Renaissance manner, gives the measure of it and is open to visit with its gardens. Restoring decoration of that family means recording before removing: a cornice profile, a moulding gauge, the drawing of a balustrade cannot be recovered from memory once the work is dismantled.

The Villa Santo Sospir, built in 1931 on the western slope of the peninsula, carries an interior decorated by Jean Cocteau; it received the Twentieth-Century Heritage label on 28 November 2000, then was protected as a historic monument on 10 December 2001. The proximity of those two registers — the neo-Renaissance of a winter visitor’s villa and the hand of a twentieth-century artist — says clearly enough that finishes here do not reduce to a single style. We take each house for what it is, and not for the idea one holds of the Riviera.

Exposed on three sides, the peninsula takes salt deposition on very nearly every orientation: there is no sheltered façade here in the sense understood back from the coast. That changes the choice of grades more than the choice of forms. On the immediate shore, A4 / 316L stainless steel, alloyed with molybdenum, is required on ironwork and ironmongery where an A2 / 304 grade would pit rapidly. A hinge, an espagnolette, the fixings of a balustrade are tiny pieces whose replacement costs more in disturbance than the added care at the point of order.

The coastal path runs round the peninsula in direct contact with the sea: the lower parts of properties are in the front line of exposure to spray and to waves in heavy weather. A render, a stained timber, a lacquered metal do not age there as they do ten metres higher. On one and the same property we therefore distinguish what counts as a sheltered finish from what counts as an exposed one — same material, same colours, different protective systems. It is that kind of distinction which decides how a house looks ten years after delivery.

Sunlight on the slopes is very uneven according to orientation. The one facing the neighbouring roadstead, to the west, and the one opening on the eastern bay call for neither the same protections nor the same exterior finishes: length of exposure, glare, the hour of morning drying, all differ. A colour that holds on one slope turns on the other. We therefore set the palette and the systems façade by façade rather than building by building, and we judge samples in place, in the light of the site, rather than in the workshop.

On the southern point, the large properties are enclosed within parks and served by private roads: a finishing site is organised there without anything showing outside, which is precisely what clients expect. The harbour village, by contrast, lines up adjoining buildings of modest scale where an out-of-plumb reads at a glance. Detail nonetheless never stands alone: it presupposes structural and general building work with tolerances held, a high-end renovation that fixes the brief, extensions and fit-outs that open the house onto its grounds. The page we devote to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat brings these four crafts together.