Bespoke finishes and interiors in Saint-Tropez

The material register of the local Provençal maritime fabric combines stone, lime renders coloured through the mass, canal tiles, timber joinery and ironwork. On a render coloured through the mass, a local repair shows: the finishing of such work is reasoned by whole elevation, not by touch-up. That is a constraint of method before it is one of means. We cut the surfaces on the lines the architecture gives — a corner, a band, a downpipe — and not where the defect stops. A joint made in the middle of an elevation always reads.

Colour, in this register, is not a coat: it is the mortar itself. It is prepared by the batch, it varies with water and with the hand, and two batches three days apart will not give exactly the same tone. We therefore require the quantity for a whole elevation to be prepared at once, made on site, and a dated sample kept. Canal tiles, timber joinery and ironwork are reasoned the same way: by coherent set, never by isolated element replaced piece by piece.

The dominant built register of the sector is Provençal maritime, with the mas and bastides on one side and contemporary villas facing the sea on the other. The latter bring in large joinery, exposed concrete and slender metalwork — a finishing vocabulary entirely foreign to that of the mas. The demand is not lower there, it is other: the mas accepts a slight lean it has carried for two centuries, the contemporary villa forgives nothing, because everything in it is straight line, recessed joint and sharp arris.

On exposed concrete, the finish is decided before the pour: formwork face, setting-out of the shutters, position of the tie holes, treatment of the arrises. Nothing can be made good afterwards. On a mas, by contrast, the finish is decided as the work goes, following what the wall reveals once hacked off. We run these two methods separately and refuse to mix them on one job: it is the mixture, more than either one, that produces interiors without character.

The old fabric of the town stands in direct contact with the shore: it combines damp at the foot of walls and salt deposition on exposed façades. The two defects compound each other, and a finish cannot treat them separately. A render that blocks evaporation at the foot of a wall carries the salt higher; too film-forming a surface treatment traps it within the thickness. We therefore work in open systems, from substrate to final coat, and we accept slow, regular ageing rather than a new look that will not hold.

Coastal exposure further imposes marine-class grades on all external metalwork and ironmongery, and the bays of the commune do not share one regime: one looks out to the open sea, the other to the head of the gulf, which changes spray and wind from one property to the next. The old core, for its part, is not accessible to machines and imposes hand carriage. Finishes finally presuppose what carries them: structural and general building work that makes the foot of walls sound, a high-end renovation that fixes the approach, extensions and fit-outs that carry the house towards the garden. The page we devote to Saint-Tropez brings these four crafts together.