High-end renovation in Èze

Èze-Village is a medieval core perched on a rocky spur, overlooking the bays of Beaulieu, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Cap-d’Ail. Its fabric is made of adjoining stone houses, interlocked in tiers on the rock, served by cobbled ramps and stairs. A complete renovation here rarely consists of redrawing a plan: it consists of making habitable, without betraying it, a volume constrained by the rock and by the neighbours. Square metres are gained by clearing a vault or reworking a level, never by pushing the walls out.

The village vocabulary of finishing is that of exposed stone, thin renders and vaults — a sober register, in no way comparable with the decoration of the coastal holiday villas. The commune is in fact tiered into three distinct entities, the perched village, the seafront and the pass, separated by several hundred metres of level difference. At Èze-Bord-de-Mer, at the foot of the cliff and against the lower corniche, one finds holiday building stock and direct saline exposure: an altogether different work, in the same commune.

The church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, neoclassical and dating from the eighteenth century, is built on the foundations of a twelfth-century church; it has been classified as a historic monument since 5 December 1984. Its presence carries a regime of protection of the setting that covers a large part of the village core. Within that perimeter, repair of a façade, a roof or a joinery element is examined on that basis. We therefore frame the programme of any external work against what the formality allows, before settling its design.

The cliffs of Èze are furthermore named among the entities covered by the landscape protection policy for the eastern coast of the department, alongside the peninsulas of Cap Ferrat and Cap Martin and Mont Boron and Mont Alban. To that is added the common coastal framework: a hundred-metre strip not buildable outside urbanised areas, extension of urbanisation limited and justified in the areas close to the shore. In a commune where one builds on the flank, the question put at examination is almost always that of the silhouette seen from afar.

The village is entirely pedestrian: no vehicle circulates within it. Manual handling is therefore the rule — supplies, removals and equipment go up and down by the same lanes and the same stairs. The village is moreover a site of heavy visitor traffic, and the occupation of its walkways by the public is added to the constraints of delivery. Between the seafront and the village the level difference is counted in hundreds of metres, on hairpin roads: the logistics of a site in the village have nothing in common with those of a site on the coast of the same commune.

A complete work here calls on our other crafts at the rhythm the slope allows: structural and general building work to make good a vault or a tiered retaining wall, bespoke finishes and interiors for stone, thin renders and joinery cut to the survey, extensions and villa fit-outs when a terrace gains a few metres on the rock. The director remains the sole point of contact. The area-served page devoted to the commune brings these four crafts together.