High-end renovation in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

The commune sets side by side two architectural registers that are rarely neighbours. The village has kept its medieval character: narrow lanes covered by Romanesque vaults, old houses, the rue Moncollet, stairs. It is dominated by the castle known as Grimaldi, a fortification of the late tenth century whose keep, twenty-six metres high, is held to be the oldest keep still standing in France; it was registered as a historic monument by an order of 28 February 1927. Renovating a house in that fabric means working within old masonry and vaulted volumes that cannot be redrawn.

At Cap-Martin the fabric belongs to another century entirely: the villa E-1027 designed by Eileen Gray, the Cabanon built by Le Corbusier in 1952, the Camping Units and the restaurant L’Étoile de Mer form an ensemble of the modern movement on a footprint of some two thousand nine hundred and seventy square metres — the Cabanon having been inscribed in July 2016 on the World Heritage list, within the series « The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier ». The material register that follows from it — timber partitions, industrial materials, minimal volumes — calls for a vocabulary of finishing foreign to that of the village.

The presence of the registered castle in the village and of a World Heritage property at Cap-Martin carries heritage constraints of a different nature on the two sectors of the commune. Nothing is therefore transposed from one sector to the other: what holds within the setting of a registered monument does not hold within the environment of a property inscribed on the World Heritage list, and conversely. A renovation is framed here sector by sector, from what the place precisely protects.

Cap-Martin is moreover a site owned by the Conservatoire du littoral, which carries a specific regime of management and intervention. To that is added the coastal framework common to shoreline communes: a hundred-metre strip not buildable outside urbanised areas, extension of urbanisation limited and justified in the areas close to the shore. On a wooded peninsula where maritime exposure is severe, the question of renewing exposed elements arises with every campaign of works.

The medieval village is served by stepped lanes and vaulted passages. Manual handling is the rule there, and the size of what can be carried is limited by the width of the passages: this is a design input, not an execution difficulty — a worktop, a door frame, a basin are drawn according to what can be brought in. The commune moreover stretches from the upper village down to the Carnolès seafront: distance and level difference between sectors govern the organisation of the working day as much as the brief itself.

A renovation carried through end to end calls on our other crafts according to the sector: structural and general building work to make good a Romanesque vault in the village or a wooded retaining wall at Cap-Martin, bespoke finishes and interiors for elements cut to the size of the passages, extensions and villa fit-outs when a terrace gains on the slope running down towards Carnolès. The director runs the whole from end to end. The commune’s area-served page brings these four crafts together.