High-end renovation in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

The peninsula holds a concentration of holiday villas built for an international clientele between the late nineteenth century and the interwar years. Two of them say what level of demand the place carries: the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, known as the Villa Île-de-France, raised between 1905 and 1912 in a neo-Renaissance manner, and the Villa Santo Sospir, built in 1931 on the western slope, whose interior decoration is by Jean Cocteau — awarded the Twentieth-Century Heritage label on 28 November 2000, then protected as a historic monument on 10 December 2001. Renovating here means knowing what stands before you before opening anything at all.

The building stock falls into two worlds: the port village, dense and modest in scale, and the great properties standing alone in their parks. The decorative vocabulary of the latter combines marbles, fibrous plaster and stucco, wrought ironwork and small-paned joinery — a set exposed, here, on three sides to the marine atmosphere. That governs the order of the works: decoration is surveyed and protected before any removal, ironmongery and locksmithing are treated for a saline environment, and paint goes back on only once the envelope is watertight.

Cap Ferrat is classified as a site by an order of 15 July 1975. The consequence for a client is direct: on a classified site, works require special authorisation from the prefect or from the minister responsible for sites, depending on their scale — a more demanding regime than that of a registered site, where a prior declaration suffices. A renovation that alters the external appearance of a residence is therefore not handled like an internal reordering, and the programme of a work is built out from that formality, not the other way round.

The peninsula is furthermore covered by the Natura 2000 site « Cap Ferrat », referenced FR9301996, which is subject to an objectives document. To that is added the framework common to coastal communes: the hundred-metre strip measured from the upper limit of the shore cannot be built on outside urbanised areas, and any extension of urbanisation in the areas close to the shore is admitted only where limited and justified. On a property of the Cap or of the Pointe Saint-Hospice, these layers are read together, plot by plot.

The peninsula is served by a dead-end road network: one enters and leaves through the same neck, with no bypass route. Nothing is improvised here where deliveries are concerned, and a badly placed skip halts more than one site. The sectors do not share the same logistics: the great properties of the Cap are enclosed and served by private roads; the village imposes the tight scale of a port town, its quays and its lanes; Passable, on the western slope, adds the gradient. Sequencing takes account of that geography before it takes account of the brief.

A complete work summons our other crafts as the site advances: structural and general building work to make good a terraced-garden retaining wall, bespoke finishes and interiors to restore a stucco or a panelling surveyed before removal, extensions and villa fit-outs when a pool or an orangery enters the brief. The director holds the thread from the first survey to the clearing of snags. The area-served page devoted to the peninsula brings these four crafts together.