Extensions & villa fit-outs in Saint-Tropez

The entire commune is covered by the registered site of the peninsula, instituted by an order of 15 February 1966 and completed by an order of 12 January 1967. On a registered site, any modification of the appearance of the place is subject to a prior formality with the administration: the constraint does not target a town-centre perimeter, it bears on the whole of the communal territory. An extension, a pool, a pool-house at the end of a wooded estate are therefore concerned just as much as an elevation on the harbour.

As a coastal commune, Saint-Tropez further applies the hundred-metre strip, measured from the high limit of the shore, and the regime governing areas close to the shore — two rules that weigh on the siting of a new volume far more than on the making good of an existing one. The coastal conservancy owns the Salin site within the communal territory. The only commune in our territory situated in the Var, it is not reasoned about with Alpes-Maritimes references: neither the site doctrines nor the territorial architecture service transpose to it.

On the private estates of the commune, private-law covenants layer over the planning rules: subdivision schedules of conditions and an estate regulation, binding between owners. A project may comply with the local plan and still run into the estate’s schedule of conditions. East of the town, three subdivisions each holding its own schedule of conditions are gathered under a free owners’ association; their common regulation was adopted on 2 August 1980, recast by extraordinary general meeting on 19 August 1997, then lodged with a notary on 17 June 1998.

These documents are contractual. They have neither the same author, nor the same judge, nor the same amendment procedure as the local plan, and their content varies from one estate to the next: we never presume it. Before drawing, we therefore ask for both sets of rules and read them together. An administrative consent obtained does not dispense with the contractual agreement, and the converse holds. That is the first work of an extension here, and it is done on documents.

The official risk inventory of the commune mentions radon, which the inventory of the Riviera communes in our territory does not. The parameter has nothing to do with the façade: it concerns the ventilation of buried and semi-buried volumes. A cellar, a plant room, the lower part of a pool-house set into the ground are conceived here with their ventilation from sketch stage, and not as a retrofit once the walls are poured. It is little to draw early, and a great deal to correct late.

Exposure, finally, is not deduced from the commune but from the plot: two bays of the territory do not share the same opening — one faces the open sea, the other the head of the gulf — which changes the spray regime from one property to the next and imposes marine-class grades on external metalwork and ironmongery. There remains the built register: mas and bastides on one side, contemporary villas facing the sea on the other. An extension must choose its camp, or take on the task of linking the two. Structural and general building work fix what carries it, high-end renovation brings the rest of the house to the same level, bespoke finishes and interiors hold its register.