High-end renovation in Beaulieu-sur-Mer

From its vocation as a winter resort the commune inherited a Belle Époque building stock — holiday villas, hotels, leisure buildings. The Villa Kérylos gives the measure of it: built between 1902 and 1908 by the architect Emmanuel-Elisée Pontremoli for the historian and archaeologist Théodore Reinach, it reconstitutes a Greek residence of the Hellenistic period adapted to the comfort of its own day, and the twelve monolithic columns of its peristyle are of white Carrara marble. This is not a curiosity: it is the level of material demand on which local villégiature was built, and the level against which a renovation is measured here.

The local decorative register combines marbles, stucco and fibrous plaster, mosaics, ironwork and old floors. Each of these materials has its own rule of repair, and none forgives the reverse order: a mosaic floor is surveyed and protected before any site traffic, fibrous plaster is moulded from the existing before removal, ironwork is treated before the joinery framing it is repainted. Along the seafront, where exposure is direct, these elements come to renovation with more advanced ageing than their equivalents sheltered a few hundred metres away.

The presence within the commune of a classified historic monument — the Villa Kérylos, classified since 15 September 1966 — carries a regime of protection for its setting. That regime governs works visible from the monument or in shared visibility with it: a façade repair, a change of joinery, a roof renewal are not decided on the criterion of design alone. We therefore begin with the question of visibility before that of design, and the programme of any external work is set against what the formality allows.

To that is added the common coastal framework: the hundred-metre strip from the upper limit of the shore cannot be built on outside urbanised areas, and extension of urbanisation in the areas close to the shore remains limited and justified. Two harbours — Fourmis and Plaisance — structure the communal seafront and the heritage protections attaching to it. A residence on the Baie des Fourmis and a villa in La Petite Afrique therefore do not fall under the same constraints, though a few hundred metres separate them.

The fabric of the centre and of the harbour surroundings is tight: site parking and the footprint on the public highway are, in practice, the first constraint to settle — before the trades, before the programme. The commune offers in exchange a rare advantage: the bay of Beaulieu is one of the best sheltered on the Riviera coast, and the quarter of La Petite Afrique owes its name to the particularly mild microclimate given it by the screen of the cliffs. A site here suffers fewer seasonal hazards than one a few kilometres away on an open coast.

A renovation carried through end to end calls on our other crafts as it advances: structural and general building work when an old floor has to be made good, bespoke finishes and interiors for the stucco, the marbles, the mosaics and the floors, extensions and villa fit-outs when a sheltered garden or a pool completes the brief. One point of contact, the director, from survey to handover. The area-served page devoted to the commune brings these four crafts together.