High-end renovation in Nice

Nice was inscribed on 27 July 2021 on the World Heritage list under the title « Nice, Winter Resort Town of the Riviera », under criterion (ii): the inscription retains the fusion of British, Italian, French and Russian influences, which produced a diversity of architectural styles and of decoration. The building stock falls between the old fabric of Vieux-Nice — tall, narrow, adjoining buildings —, the bourgeois buildings of the nineteenth century and the Belle Époque, and the holiday villas of the hills. Three fabrics, three ways of running a complete renovation.

In a bourgeois apartment the decoration belongs to fibrous plaster and moulded plaster, to parquet, to marble fireplaces and to small-paned joinery. Yet fibrous plaster is the first element lost through successive renovations: restoring it presupposes a survey before removal, not a reconstitution after the fact. On the structural side the caution is of the same order — in an old adjoining building around a courtyard, load paths are shared with the neighbouring buildings, and opening a load-bearing wall engages the structure of a whole block and not of a single dwelling.

The safeguarded sector of Vieux-Nice was created by decree of 11 September 1969 and extended by decree of 28 January 1985; it is bounded to the south by the sea, to the west by the Paillon, to the north by the place Garibaldi and to the east by the port. Its safeguarding and enhancement plan was approved by decree of 17 December 1993 and amended by decree of 22 October 1997: it is that document, and not the metropolitan local plan alone, which governs works within the perimeter. Since the law of 7 July 2016, safeguarded sectors have become remarkable heritage sites as of right.

The city holds a second: the Port quarter, established on 9 November 1994, organised around the places Garibaldi and Île-de-Beauté on an urban plan of 1844 inspired by the Turin model. To these national protections is added an obligation to manage and preserve the outstanding universal value of the inscribed property — which covers five hundred and twenty-two hectares surrounded by a buffer zone of four thousand two hundred and forty-three hectares, from Mont Boron to the hills of Cimiez and Les Baumettes. Knowing which layer an address falls in is the first task of any project here.

Nice is the only commune in our area where temporary occupation of the public highway sits in a large-city context: dense traffic, surface public transport, shops at ground level. Vieux-Nice, for its part, is a fabric of lanes inaccessible to ordinary site vehicles — supply is by manual handling or within regulated delivery windows. In the bourgeois buildings of the centre, historic stairwells and their balustrades are protected elements in themselves: protecting them during the works is a line item in its own right, not a matter of common sense.

A complete renovation here calls on our other crafts in an order imposed by the fabric: structural and general building work when an opening engages a party wall around a courtyard, bespoke finishes and interiors to restore moulded plaster surveyed before removal, extensions and villa fit-outs when a villa at Cimiez or Les Baumettes gains a terrace on the slope. The director remains the single point of contact, from survey to handover. The area-served page devoted to the city brings these four crafts together.