Bespoke finishes and interiors in Villefranche-sur-Mer

The façade register of the old town is that of coloured render in the Italian manner, inherited from the territory’s long belonging to the States of Savoy. It is not a way of decorating: it is a way of building. Colour lies in the material, mouldings are often painted rather than applied, and the whole reads at the scale of a full street, not of an isolated house. Reworking a façade in that fabric therefore means recording the neighbouring colours, the tones of limewash, the way one elevation answers the one opposite. A colour right on its own can be wrong in place.

Vaults, arches and stone stairs form the dominant constructional vocabulary of the old centre: reworking anything there almost always touches a load-bearing element. That shifts the usual boundary between finishes and structure. Taking render off a vault, making good the nose of a stone step, freeing an arch hidden behind a lining: these are decided with the structural survey in hand. We do not treat a facing in the old centre as a covering — it is part of the work that holds.

Medieval fabric in permanent contact with the ground and with the humidity of the roadstead presents a recurrent risk of rising damp at the foot of walls. It is the first cause of failure of a fine interior finish in this fabric: render laid on a wall that discharges badly comes away, a timber skirting swells, paint blisters, and the defect returns at the same height after two winters. We therefore treat the foot of the wall before the decoration, with vapour-permeable materials, and we accept letting a wall breathe rather than making it watertight.

The roadstead turns the fabric due south onto a wide maritime opening: strong glare, long sunlight, continuous saline exposure on the façades that face it. The eastern and western slopes do not undergo the same thermal regime, and on one site two façades may call for two distinct treatments. The residential slope above the roadstead, with its terraced villas and its hairpin access, adds the question of views: joinery there is drawn as much for what it frames as for what it closes.

The old town is not accessible to machines: lanes, stairs and covered passages impose hand carriage of materials and removal of rubble by the same route. For finishing work the consequence is one of dimension before it is one of time. A stone slab, a mirror, a full-height door, a single-piece worktop are surveyed along the actual route before being ordered — passage width, height under a vault, swing on a turning stair. That survey avoids the one error that cannot be corrected: the right material, halted at the door.

The high point of the commune, at the junction of the corniches, and the coastal road that crosses it each set their own access: steep fall on one side, roadside building and plot entrances off the carriageway on the other. Three sectors, three logistics, one standard. Finishes never go alone here either: they presuppose structural and general building work that gives the plumb, a high-end renovation that holds the brief, extensions and fit-outs that open the house onto the roadstead. The page we devote to Villefranche-sur-Mer brings these four crafts together.