Service area on the French Riviera

Nice

06000, 06100, 06200, 06300

Nice is the city France Serrure is based in, and also the one whose buildings call for the most nuance: the Genoese blocks of Vieux-Nice, the Belle Époque façades of Cimiez, the large hillside co-owned developments and the new schemes on the plaine du Var all meet within a few kilometres.

Cannes

06400, 06150

Cannes is built on a slope: Le Suquet at the top with its stepped lanes, the Croisette below with its porter-staffed buildings, and La Bocca to the west, which lives all year round while the rest of the town empties out.

Le Cannet

06110

Le Cannet is two communes in one: an old village clinging to the hillside, and a long residential belt running down until it touches Cannes without the boundary ever being visible.

Mandelieu-la-Napoule

06210

Between the Estérel and the sea, Mandelieu-la-Napoule lines up marinas where you park in front of your boat, an old quarter around the château, and hillside housing clinging to the red slopes.

Mougins

06250

Mougins is a commune of gates as much as of doors: a village spiralling up to its summit, and all around it residential estates where you cross two boundaries before reaching the house.

Vallauris

06220

Vallauris comes in two halves that have little in common: the potters’ town inland, and Golfe-Juan down on the shore, with its harbour and its summer season.

Antibes

06600, 06160

Antibes packs three kinds of building stock into a single commune: an old town shut inside its ramparts, a cape of walled properties, and Juan-les-Pins, whose population doubles in summer.

Biot

06410

Biot fits a perched medieval village and a modern residential plain within a few minutes of one another — two kinds of building, two ways of working.

Villeneuve-Loubet

06270

Villeneuve-Loubet stretches from the medieval village beneath its keep to the concrete waves of Marina Baie des Anges, by way of a residential plain and a very seasonal sea front.

Cagnes-sur-Mer

06800

Cagnes-sur-Mer reads in three storeys: medieval Haut-de-Cagnes at the top, the working town in the middle, and Cros-de-Cagnes, a former fishing village, at the water’s edge.

Saint-Laurent-du-Var

06700

Separated from Nice by nothing but the bed of the Var, Saint-Laurent-du-Var mixes an old village, a very dense retail plain and hillside housing rising towards Les Pugets.

Menton

06500

Backing onto the Italian border, Menton stacks up an old town in tiers, Belle Époque villas in the gardens of Garavan, and residential districts climbing the Careï and Borrigo valleys.

Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

06190

Roquebrune-Cap-Martin brings together a medieval village perched beneath its keep, a wooded cape of walled properties, and a seafront stretched out between Monaco and Menton.

Beausoleil

06240

Beausoleil is built on a slope so steep that the town is crossed vertically, by public lifts and stairways — a constraint that changes in practical terms how a call-out is handled.

Villefranche-sur-Mer

06230

Villefranche-sur-Mer drops towards its bay through stepped lanes and vaulted passages — among them the famous rue Obscure — while the villas rise in tiers along the corniches above.

Grasse

06130

A sub-prefecture clinging to its hillside, Grasse layers a very dense medieval old town, former perfumeries converted into homes, and hamlets scattered among the restanques — the dry-stone farming terraces of the back country.

Vence

06140

Vence keeps a historic town enclosed in its oval of ramparts and opened by five gateways, around which spreads a commune of villas and restanques (dry-stone terraces) backing onto the baous, the limestone cliffs above.