Light on the Cap

Restoration is an argument with time, and the most graceful restorations are the ones that know which battles to concede. On Cap Ferrat, a Belle Époque villa that had drifted into grandeur-by-accretion was returned, room by room, to a single organising idea: the light.

Every window was reconsidered not as an aperture but as a frame. Some were enlarged, some deliberately left small to make the eventual view earn its impact. Interior walls came down where they had been added; others were rebuilt to recover the proportions the original architects intended. The sea, which had been treated as a backdrop, became the subject.

The result is a house that feels older and newer at once — faithful to its period, yet unmistakably built for how we live now. That tension, held with confidence, is what separates a restoration from a renovation.