How long does a complete villa renovation take?

We give no duration before having surveyed and probed, and we prefer to say why. A renovation calendar is not an area multiplied by a rate: it is a chain of phases each of which waits on the one before, crossed by three clocks that are not ours — that of the administrative process, that of the materials, that of the building or the neighbourhood. What we can say beforehand is what we will go and check, in what order, and at what moment a figure will cease to be a hypothesis.

Is an architect required to renovate a villa?

In France an architect is required to draw up the architectural project of a building permit application, except for a natural person building or altering for themselves below a floor area threshold set by decree, today one hundred and fifty square metres — a threshold assessed on the total after works. In Monaco the reasoning does not apply: the file must be signed by an architect registered with the Principality’s Order of Architects, with no exempting threshold. We are an execution contractor and we work with architects; when a project calls for one, our first advice is to appoint one.

Can a residence be renovated while occupied, or a flat in an inhabited building?

Yes, provided the site protocol is treated as a work in its own right. It says how the common parts are protected, what the hours are, by which route the rubble leaves, and what happens if something is damaged. Noisy tasks are concentrated into a short window; the rest of the time goes to silent work. It is a planning constraint before it is a tooling one, and it is prepared upstream, never during.

Craftsmanship

High-end renovation

The complete transformation of a residence, orchestrated from A to Z under a single point of contact — the director.

To renovate a residence completely is to hold a single thread from survey to handover: structure, services, envelope, materials, finishes. On the Côte d’Azur the exercise bears on a fabric almost never conceived for what is asked of it today — villégiature villas, bourgeois apartment buildings, village houses, mas and bastides. The work consists in bringing contemporary comfort into volumes that are the value of the place, without spoiling them.

A single point of contact leads the work. Turyk Volodymyr is present on every site, chooses the materials, directs every trade and checks every finish. That is what allows a discovery made during strip-out to be settled within the hour — and virtually every judgement call in a renovation is born of a discovery.

Five registers of building fabric, one standard of rigour

Our perimeter brings together architectures that call for neither the same gestures nor the same materials. The coastal villégiature villas associate plasterwork, stucco, marble, wrought ironwork and small-paned joinery. The bourgeois buildings of the nineteenth century carry moulded plaster, parquet and marble chimneypieces. The village cores — hill villages, fishermen’s quarters — offer a tight party-wall fabric of stone and lime. The mas and bastides hold to render coloured through the mass and to the canal tile. The seafront contemporary, finally, plays on large joinery and fine metalwork.

Recognising the register before choosing the material is no historian’s elegance: it is what prevents a villa vocabulary being laid inside a village house. Decoration is recorded before it is taken down, and is restored to the model rather than to the catalogue.

Registered site, classified site, remarkable heritage site

Three notions that common language confuses and that the law separates. On a registered site, any works altering the appearance of the place are subject to prior declaration to the administration; on a classified site, to special authorisation from the prefect or from the minister responsible for sites, according to their scale. Since the law of 7 July 2016 on the freedom of creation, architecture and heritage, conservation sectors created earlier have become remarkable heritage sites as of right, with no new listing procedure.

These are neither the same files, nor the same timescales, nor the same interlocutors. The applicable regime is verified at the very start: it determines what the project may aim at, and therefore the brief itself. A renovation that discovers its regime after costing has costed something other than what it will build.

Eleven communes, two departments, two legal regimes

The perimeter is not legally homogeneous, and ignoring that has a price. Ten communes fall under the French planning code and the coastal regime: the hundred-metre strip measured from the high-water mark is not buildable outside urbanised areas, and the extension of urbanisation in areas close to the shore is admitted only where limited and justified. Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the only non-coastal commune, escapes it.

Monaco is a sovereign state: neither the French planning code, nor the coastal law, nor the French regime governing the surroundings of historic monuments applies there. A habit formed in Nice does not transpose, and the vocabulary itself differs. Saint-Tropez, finally, lies in the Var: the site doctrines of the Alpes-Maritimes and the department’s seismic zoning do not transpose there either. One trade, three frameworks — and the first thing to establish on a project is which of them it falls under.

Our services

Site management
Technical trades
Architect & designer coordination
Full restoration

Questions