What a drawing settles before the works
A drawing is not there to look good on a screen. It is there to settle, on paper, questions that would be expensive to settle on site: where the waste pipe runs, which partition can come down, where to find the fifteen centimetres that make a bathroom usable, how to open up without weakening anything.
We survey what is there on site, to the actual dimensions and not to those of the original drawing — in a period building the difference is commonly several centimetres. Then we draw the proposed state: partitions, services, water points, electrics, openings. That set of drawings is what the quotation and the works are then based on, and it is the reason the quotation matches what is built.
Prior declaration or planning permission: what is applied for, and when
Anything that stays inside and changes neither the façade, nor the openings, nor the floor area needs no planning consent at all. As soon as the outward appearance is altered — a window, a shutter, a balustrade, the colour of the render — a prior declaration of works is required. Above the thresholds for new floor area, or for a significant extension, it is planning permission.
In Nice, two further points apply. Within the protected areas — Old Nice, the surroundings of listed monuments — the Architecte des Bâtiments de France gives an opinion that is binding, and the time it takes lengthens the programme. And in a co-owned building, planning consent never replaces a vote at the general meeting: both are needed, and they are not applied for at the same moment.
We put the file together, we lodge it and we follow it through. You do not have to learn French planning law to have your apartment renovated.
Project management: who does what
Designing and building are two trades. Project management means holding the second to the service of the first: tendering, comparing, planning, checking what is done, verifying the interim accounts, organising practical completion and following the snags through to the end.
When we take on both, the drawing and the site do not contradict each other — what was drawn is what is built, by the same teams. When you already have an architect, we work on the building side: we price his project and we carry it out, without redrawing what has already been settled.
What is decided early and cannot be undone
The finished ceiling height once the linings and the suspended ceiling are in. The direction a floor is laid in, which gives a run of rooms its perspective. The exact position of a water point, which decides the fall of the waste pipe. The position of the light switches, which decides the daily comfort of the place for the next twenty years.
Those choices are made on the drawing, calmly, before the first wall comes down. This is the moment when an hour of thought is worth a week on site.