Extensions & villa fit-outs in Èze

The commune is tiered into three distinct entities — the hilltop village, the seafront and the col — separated by several hundred metres of level difference. An enlargement project has no common definition here: in the village it is limited to reclaiming a party-walled volume interlocked with the rock; at the foot of the cliff it faces the sea and sits on shoreline villégiature; at the col it composes with dominant positions and a steep gradient. One commune, three ways of adding square metres.

Wind and salt are not distributed evenly either. The hilltop village is exposed on every face, with no relief screening it from above: wind loading is markedly higher there than on the sheltered shore. Conversely the lower part takes a direct salt deposit of which the village, several hundred metres higher, is far less a victim. Two terraces in the same commune therefore call for neither the same anchorages, nor the same metal grades, nor the same protections.

The church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, classified as a historic monument since 5 December 1984, brings a protection regime over its surroundings covering a large part of the village core. On the lower part of the territory, the commune being coastal, the hundred-metre strip and the regime governing areas close to the shore apply. The cliffs are moreover among the features targeted by the landscape protection policy for the department’s eastern coast: what is seen from the sea and from the corniche counts as much as what is seen from the plot.

The commune falls within seismic zone 4 under decree no. 2010-1255. On a stepped site, earth pressure on the retaining structures commands the feasibility of a new terrace as much as the regulation does: a suspended pool, a cantilevered sun deck, a stone pool-house are justified first by the wall that carries them. We settle that question before the sketch, because it decides what one may hope for.

The village is entirely pedestrian: no vehicle circulates within it. Deliveries, removals and equipment go up and down the same calades and the same stairs, by hand — and it is the envelope of those passages that fixes the size of the largest element one can bring in. A piece of joinery, a beam, a tank are therefore conceived according to what passes, not according to what is sold. The level difference between the shore and the village runs to hundreds of metres, on hairpin roads: two sites in one commune do not have the same working day.

Dry-stone construction shapes the whole built landscape here — restanques, retaining walls, calades — and rebuilding it belongs to structural and general building work before it belongs to landscaping. A complete renovation then tunes the house to the volume gained, and bespoke finishes and interiors lay in the sober material of the village, exposed stone, thin renders and vaults, rather than the decoration of the shoreline villas. That is the order in which our crafts in Èze hold.