Extensions & villa fit-outs in Saint-Paul-de-Vence

The municipal regulation settles very precisely the question on which the feasibility of an extension depends. The ground-coverage coefficient takes in balconies, adjoining stairs, front steps and terraces attached to the house — but also basements and buried volumes. It leaves out of the calculation basins, whether a swimming pool, a retention tank or a water store, ornamental low walls, and roof overhangs that rest neither on posts nor on corbels. A basin therefore does not consume the same resource as a terrace: that shapes a project from the first sketch.

In sectors UC1, UC2 and UC3 two coefficients are cumulative — a general one calculated excluding terraces, and one specific to terraces which is added to it. Open ground kept in full earth answers a definition just as strict: a surface bearing no construction, no roadway, no parking, no terrace, no pool and no artificial turf, and whose permeability may not be impaired by any works. Cellular structures seeded with grass do not count towards it.

A plot division is admissible on one condition only: that every new land unit — and the parent plot once reduced — simultaneously meet the ground coverage, both siting rules relative to roads and to property boundaries, and the percentage of open ground in full earth. Detaching a lot therefore does not release the original land from its obligations. That calculation is made before drawing, never after.

The regulation further expressly prohibits fill and raising of ground level carried out with construction spoil, including to level an access: earth taken from an excavation may not serve to make up a slope on site — it is carted away. As for the backwash water from the filters of pools, fountains and ornamental basins, it reaches the public network through a pressure-break chamber fitted with a forty-millimetre flow reducer, held to two and a half litres per second — a point of execution to be provided for at design stage, not at filling.

Creating a terrace is not merely a matter of building a wall. The regulation requires areas treated as restanques to follow the slope of the ground, and the walls to be separated by landscaped terraces at least two metres fifty wide. It is a rule of drawing as much as a rule of stability: it rules out the stack of closely spaced low walls that would yield flat ground cheaply, and obliges the project to follow the hillside rather than contradict it.

Outside the walls, the land is occupied by mas, bastides and villas set on agricultural terraces and wooded ground: it is there, and only there, that an extension, a pool house or a garden takes shape. Structural work prepares what is added, high-end renovation brings the house up to the level of its extension, and bespoke finishes and interiors hold its register. Our crafts in Saint-Paul-de-Vence are attuned to that landscape.