Structural and general building work in Villefranche-sur-Mer

The old fabric of the historic centre is party-walled, tall and narrow, often vaulted at ground level: loads run down continuously from one building to the next. Opening a load-bearing wall therefore never involves a single dwelling alone. Vaults, arches and stone stairs make up the dominant constructional vocabulary of the old centre, and an intervention there almost always touches an element under load. Masonry of this kind is not reasoned like a frame: it holds by its geometry, in compression, and what has to be taken up is not the vertical load alone but the thrust of the arch. Shoring is studied there for longer than the lintel takes to set.

Medieval fabric in permanent contact with the ground and with the damp of the bay carries a recurrent risk of rising moisture at the base of walls. For structural work the question is not appearance but cohesion: lime mortar leached out over the first courses loses its hold, facing stones work loose, and an intervention begun higher up bears on what was assumed to be sound. We therefore sound the foot before touching the head, and we give the wall back a regime of evaporation rather than sealing it in. An old wall is not made watertight: it is allowed to dry.

On the slopes it is the stone retaining walls — the restanques — that carry the terraces and condition any outdoor project. Their condition is the structural precondition of everything that follows: a terrace is not dealt with independently of the wall that carries it. A retaining wall that has moved reads first in the paving, in a crack that returns to the same place, in a joint that opens from one season to the next. We therefore open from below — foot cleared, drainage examined, outlets checked, footing sounded. A retaining wall gives no warning: it holds, and then it does not.

The commune falls within seismic zone 4, described as moderate, under decree no. 2010-1255. On level ground that datum translates into constructional provisions and continuity of ring beams. On a slope it combines with the gradient, and the conversation changes: a mass added at the head of a bank, a storey buried on three sides, a cross-wall removed at ground level in a stepped house are not judged as they would be on the flat. We therefore survey the ground context before the building context, and we call on a structural engineering consultancy as soon as an intervention engages overall stability rather than a single element.

Slope properties are served by steeply graded hairpin lanes where vehicle length and turning radius govern the choice of means long before the hours budget does. That settles everything that weighs: the size of the formwork panels, the length of the reinforcing bars, the way concrete is brought in, the place of the skip. In the old town, lanes, stairs and vaulted passages rule out plant; manual handling of materials and removal of rubble by the same route oblige us to conceive the work in elements that will pass. A prop, a section, a bag of binder: what does not come in does not go up, and that is settled at the survey, not at delivery.

A structure understood before it is touched: that is what afterwards allows a complete renovation to open views over the bay without weakening the neighbour, bespoke finishes and interiors to sit on stable substrates, and an extension or a pool to be considered on a slope. Our crafts in Villefranche-sur-Mer all begin there.