Craftsmanship
Structural and general building work
Foundations, underpinning, stone masonry and structures: the invisible part of a project — the one that decides everything.
Structural work is the part of a work that no one will ever see and on which everything else depends. On the Côte d’Azur it is almost always carried out on constrained ground: steep slopes, old retaining walls, the party-wall fabric of the villages, levels won from the rock. We survey and we probe before costing, because the true condition of a floor, of a load path or of a buried wall can be read on no drawing.
From Monaco to Saint-Tropez: eleven communes, two departments and two legal regimes. What one knows of a site in Nice does not transpose as it stands to a peninsula in the Var, nor to the Principality. The director leads every work himself and accepts only a limited number of them — that is the condition of work one puts one’s name to.
The ground before the wall: retaining structures, terraces, dry stone
Relief is the first fact of this coastline. Properties are terraced, and it is retaining walls — often a century old — that hold the gardens, the accesses and sometimes the seat of the building itself. Structural work therefore begins outdoors, with an examination of the retaining structures, before any question of a frame or an opening.
Those structures belong to a craft that UNESCO has singled out: the art of dry stone walling — knowledge and techniques — has been inscribed since 28 November 2018 on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, under a transnational nomination brought by eight countries including France. A dry stone wall is rebuilt; replacing it with a concrete skin changes the way the ground drains, and the ground always ends up saying so.
Seismicity, a sizing input
The Alpes-Maritimes are not a homogeneous department in this respect. Of 163 communes, 133 fall within seismic zone 4, described as moderate-average, 29 within zone 3, moderate, and one alone within zone 2. The cantons of Antibes and Cannes are among the exceptions.
The consequence is direct: the classification governs the sizing of underpinning as much as of a storey addition. Two comparable works twenty kilometres apart are therefore not calculated in the same way. It is a start-of-study check, made on the commune of the project and not on the department.
What the site regime changes for structural work
Almost all our perimeter is protected, on differing grounds. On a registered site, any works altering the appearance of the place are subject to prior declaration to the administration; on a classified site, they require special authorisation from the prefect or from the minister responsible for sites, according to their scale. Since the law of 7 July 2016, the former conservation sectors have become remarkable heritage sites as of right, with no new procedure.
To this is added the coastal framework. The ten French communes of our perimeter are coastal: the hundred-metre coastal 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 is the sole exception; Monaco, a sovereign state, is not subject to it. These regimes do not change the way one builds — they change the calendar, and it is better known at survey stage.
Our services
- Foundations & underpinning
- Stone masonry
- Framing & roofing
- Concrete & steel structures
Questions
Two distinct questions arise and must be treated separately. On the planning side, an opening that does not alter the external appearance does not necessarily call for a formality; as soon as the elevation changes, the site regime applies — prior declaration on a registered site, special authorisation on a classified site. On the building side, a party load-bearing wall engages the structure of a whole and not of a single dwelling: the co-ownership rules and the neighbours’ agreement come before the first opening. We survey both before proposing anything.
By probing, never by drawing. The signs that call for examination are known: stepped cracking in a cross wall, a floor sagging at a load path, a bulging retaining wall, rising damp at the foot of a wall. None of them is enough to conclude. We open, we measure, and we say what we have seen; until a work has been surveyed, a figure remains an opinion.
Yes, and they are not the same from one commune to the next. Of the department’s 163 communes, 133 fall within seismic zone 4, described as moderate-average, 29 within zone 3 and one within zone 2; the cantons of Antibes and Cannes are among the exceptions. The zone level governs the sizing of underpinning as much as of a storey addition. The check is made on the commune of the project, at the very start of the study.
Structural and general building work elsewhere
Craftsmanship
Contact
A structural work on the Côte d’Azur?
The director speaks French, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian.
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