High-end renovation in Cannes

The building stock of Cannes combines three distinct scales. Le Suquet, the old town, is organised around the Castre castle and the church of Notre-Dame-d’Espérance, on the hill overlooking the old port. La Croisette carries a built front of Belle Époque and interwar palace hotels, several of which are protected architectural landmarks. The hills of La Californie and Super Cannes finally carry a fabric of holiday villas issuing from the nineteenth-century winter clientele, completed by architect-designed villas of the twentieth. A complete renovation is not run the same way in those three worlds.

The decorative register of the palace hotels and villas of Cannes combines stucco and fibrous plaster, marbles, ironwork and wrought joinery, at a scale and level of finishing proper to historic luxury hotel-keeping. The requirement in repair follows from it: mouldings are more developed, heights more generous, marble bonding larger than in an ordinary bourgeois apartment. One surveys before removing, one reproduces to the original profile, and a moulding junction is never settled at the foot of the wall.

The presence of protected historic monuments — the Castre castle, the Fort Royal on the island of Sainte-Marguerite, buildings on the Croisette — carries a regime of protection by setting across several sectors of the commune. Work on the external appearance of a building situated within one of those perimeters is examined on that basis, in addition to the applicable planning rules. The Lérins islands form part of the communal territory, a fact often forgotten when reasoning about protections here.

Cannes moreover belongs to the Cannes Pays de Lérins agglomeration community, the inter-communal framework of its urban planning, and the common coastal framework applies: a hundred-metre strip not buildable outside urbanised areas, extension of urbanisation limited and justified in the areas close to the shore. On the heights of Super Cannes, where properties stand on slopes and retaining walls are numerous, it is gradient and visibility from the bay that weigh most heavily in a file.

La Croisette and the centre are subject to a calendar of international events that structures the year and heavily restricts occupation of the public highway during those periods. A seafront site is therefore planned backwards from that calendar, not the other way round. Le Suquet sets a constraint of another kind: it is a fabric of stepped lanes on the hill, where plant has no access and supply is by manual handling. At Palm Beach, on the point of the Croisette, it is exposure on several orientations that governs the choice of elements set outdoors.

A complete renovation here calls on our other crafts according to the sector: structural and general building work for a hillside retaining wall or an underpinning, bespoke finishes and interiors when stucco, marbles and ironwork recover their profile, extensions and villa fit-outs when a terrace over the bay or a pool house enters the brief. The director runs the site from end to end. The area-served page devoted to the town brings these four crafts together.