Extensions & villa fit-outs in Nice

Nice was inscribed on 27 July 2021 on the UNESCO world heritage list under the title Nice, Winter Resort Town of the Riviera, on criterion (ii). The property covers 522 hectares, surrounded by a buffer zone of 4,243 hectares, and takes in the Promenade des Anglais, the quai des États-Unis, the Terrasse des Ponchettes, the port Lympia, Mont Boron and the hills of Cimiez and Les Baumettes. A hillside villa may therefore lie within the property, within its buffer zone, or outside both — and that single point changes how an enlargement project reads.

The amphitheatre configuration facing the sea, retained by UNESCO as characteristic of riviera towns, produces sharply contrasting orientations and sun exposures from one district to another. The seafront takes the salt deposit full on, while the hills a few kilometres away are largely spared it: a pergola, a conservatory, a pool are not fitted with the same metalwork in the two places. To enlarge on the heights is first of all to choose what the bay will show from the new volume.

World heritage inscription adds an obligation to manage and preserve the outstanding universal value of the property, over and above the national protections already in force. The city also holds two former safeguarded sectors which became remarkable heritage sites by operation of the law of 7 July 2016: that of the old centre, created by decree of 11 September 1969 and extended by decree of 28 January 1985, and that of the port district, established on 9 November 1994 on an urban plan of 1844 of Turinese inspiration.

As a coastal commune, the city applies the hundred-metre strip and the regime governing areas close to the shore. It falls within seismic zone 4 under decree no. 2010-1255 — the most demanding on the continental metropolitan territory, which bears on any storey addition and on any load transfer tied to an extension. These rules do not apply in the same way to a hillside villa and to an apartment in the centre: it is the plot, not the commune, that answers.

Hillside villas are served by hairpin lanes of steep gradient, with property accesses often below or above the road: the crane or the material hoist is positioned before the project is fixed, never after. Nice is moreover the only commune in our territory where the temporary occupation of public space takes place in a large-city context — dense traffic, surface public transport, shops at ground level. In the bourgeois buildings of the centre, the historic stairwells and their balustrades are protected works in themselves: shielding them during the works is a task in its own right.

A storey addition, a conservatory or a pool on a slope begin with a question of load paths, and in an old party-walled building around a courtyard those paths are shared with the neighbours: it is structural and general building work that answers. High-end renovation then joins the new volume to the residence, and bespoke finishes and interiors restore the local vocabulary — plasterwork and moulded plaster, parquet, marble chimneypieces, small-paned joinery. Our crafts in Nice follow in that order, from the hill to the detail.