Structural and general building work in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

The village has kept its medieval character: narrow lanes covered by Romanesque vaults, old houses, stairs, the rue Moncollet. The castle, also known as the château Grimaldi, is 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 has been listed as a historic monument by order of 28 February 1927. In a village built directly on the rock and on a steep slope, making good the masonry and the vaults is the dominant structural point, ahead of any question of finish.

A geological fact governs the foundation here: the keep is built on a rock of puddingstone — a conglomerate of cemented pebbles — which forms the substrate of the village. It is a support of a different nature from the limestone of the neighbouring relief, and it cannot be treated by analogy. At the other end of the commune, Cap-Martin brings together Eileen Gray’s villa E-1027, the Cabanon built by Le Corbusier in 1952, the camping units and the restaurant L’Étoile de Mer, over some 2,970 square metres. Two registers rarely found side by side, two ways of bringing loads down.

The Cap Martin peninsula is covered by the policy for the protection of Riviera coastal sites, on the same footing as Cap Ferrat and the Boron and Alban hills. On the Cap, properties are served by narrow lanes within a sensitive site, where site encroachment on the natural area is excluded. As a coastal commune, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin comes under the hundred-metre strip and the regime governing areas close to the shore, and within seismic zone 4 under decree no. 2010-1255.

The medieval village is served by stepped lanes and vaulted passages: manual handling is the rule, and it is the width of the passages that sets the maximum size of any element that can be carried in. That constraint cannot be bought out: it is drawn, at the survey, by breaking elements down to the dimension of the narrowest passage. The commune also stretches from the upper village down to the Carnolès seafront; the distance and the level difference between sectors govern the organisation of the working day as much as the work itself.

The village fabric combines local stone masonry, Romanesque vaults and renders; old walls here are frequently overtaken by ivy and pellitory, whose removal is a precondition and not a detail of cleaning. The upper village, set against the relief and back from the shore, enjoys a markedly milder exposure than the point of the Cap, where direct maritime exposure is the dominant agent of decay for external works. Two sectors, two sets of materials.

Structure first: it decides what a complete renovation can make of a village residence as much as of a villa on the Cap, what bespoke finishes and interiors can be set on old masonry, and what an extension can win without touching the protected site. Our crafts in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin are ordered accordingly.