Extensions & villa fit-outs in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

Two situations, two ways of enlarging. In the harbour village the fabric is adjoining and modest in scale: the square metre is taken neither from the neighbour nor from the street, it is gained inside the volume — a roof space reclaimed, a lower level given back to use. On the large properties standing alone in their parks the question inverts: room is not what is lacking, but it is the park that makes the value of the place, and one does not set an orangery, a pool-house or an annexe where the plan calls for them — one sets them where the garden accepts them.

Exposure changes from one flank to the other, and it decides the siting before it decides the materials. The side turned towards the neighbouring roadstead and the one opening on the eastern bay receive neither the same sun nor the same wind: a basin does not evaporate at the same rate, a pergola does not shade the same hours, a terrace does not become usable at the same moment of the day. The gardens of the peninsula belong, moreover, as much to building as to planting — stone stairs, basins and pergolas are masonry works that live outdoors, under water and under salt, and are conceived with the rigour one brings to a building.

Cap Ferrat is classified as a site by an order of 15 July 1975. On a classified site, works require special authorisation from the prefect or from the minister responsible for sites according to their scale — a more demanding regime than the prior declaration that suffices on a registered site. The peninsula is further covered by the Natura 2000 site « Cap Ferrat », referenced FR9301996, which is subject to an objectives document. An enlargement is therefore not examined at a single counter, and the order in which the opinions are sought weighs on the programme as much as the drawing itself.

As a coastal commune it applies the hundred-metre strip measured from the high limit of the shore, which cannot be built on outside urbanised areas, and the regime governing areas close to the shore, where the extension of urbanisation is admitted only if limited and justified. That is what conditions any extension of footprint on the sea side, and it is the question to settle before the drawing, never after. We do not promise a consent: we say what the place allows one to hope for.

The classification of the Cap is not the only layer. The commune lies in its entirety within the registered site « Littoral de Nice à Menton », instituted by an order of 20 March 1973, which covers 9,426 hectares across fifteen communes. To that are added, on the same territory, the registration of the coastal land of Cap Ferrat of 12 September 1966 and the classification of the maritime public domain of 30 June 1972. Four acts, four perimeters, four regimes that do not overlap exactly. The first question of an enlargement is therefore not what one wishes to build, but under which of those perimeters lies the place where one would like to build it.

An enlargement never arrives alone. Structural and general building work says what the ground and the existing fabric can carry; a complete renovation brings the residence up to the level of what is added to it, failing which the addition underlines the old rather than serving it; bespoke finishes and interiors tune the materials of one to those of the other, until the junction ceases to be seen. It is in that order that our crafts hold together in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.