Nice - Villa Collin de Huovila
- department: Alpes-Maritimes
- municipality: Nice
- naming: Villa Collin de Huovila
- address : 139 Promenade des Anglais
- cadastral references: 0MP 291
- author: Marius-Charles Allinge (architect)
- date: 1911
- protection: unprotected building
- label patrimoine XXe: Commission régionale du patrimoine et des sites (CRPS) du 2 December 2015
At the beginning of the 20th century, in Nice, villas and buildings gradually turned their backs on the city centre and turned their full orientation towards the coast. The Promenade des Anglais, a mythical avenue that runs along the Baie des Anges, is a valuable testimony of successive practices and technical developments, a "story" of Nice’s tourist and urban policy.
Villa Collin de Huovila is one of the few examples of a typology of which few examples remain in Nice.The program is that of a single-family house of two levels on the basement, surmounted by a gazebo.
The compact and simple mass plan partly prefigures the 1950-60 solution "in piano keys". Indeed, it meets an imperative of development in depth. The basement is accessible by an open staircase on the back façade. The entrance is to the east, from a narrow car passage, it is focused on the stairs. The slightly elevated ground floor concentrates the tiny reception, a dining room on the front, skillfully completed by a mini-living room allowing the direct transition from the entrance to the garden. On the back, small office, kitchen and pantry. Classic element of these villas, a porch marks the passage to the garden.
On the floor, the main bedroom in the South is lined with a very airy lounge-boudoir, accessible directly from the L-shaped landing, so also available for the two small bedrooms located on the back. A real bathroom and a separate toilet are also common to the three bedrooms thanks to this landing. The second floor forms a belvedere with only a very glazed square room, accessible from a tiny spiral staircase from the first floor.
Openings, axes, distributions are combined to produce maximum effect and ease while the space is very small. No scale errors, impossible grandiloquence or inconvenient smallness. Same qualities for decoration and architectural effects, especially the offsets of volumes, oriels and cantilevers. They are localized and concentrated on major facade panels with sufficient recoil to absorb visual overload. A sculpture by François Virieux adorns the southeast corner of the tower’s corbel: allegory of a battle of flowers, it includes a woman (cariatide by the location) and two loves who send her roses. On the rest of the facades, a decoration "Louis XV style very modernised" (period commentary). The masonry is coated. The terrace accessible from the gazebo is typical of modern 1900 construction. Note the interesting treatment of roof covers in samurai helmet, with ceramics on the shore. All the polychrome ceramic elements (white and pink-scaled roof, the ridge, the claws forming damping balustrades) come from the famous Saïssi factory in Menton. The painted decoration that completed the ensemble has now disappeared.
A secondary volume, pastiche of the style of the villa, was added in 1974, in decline compared to the original building.
- Editor: Michel Steve (City of Nice).