Garden redevelopment in Menton
An historical garden in ‘’riviera’’ style from the XIX century, today a luxury condominium: new necessities and a project to share
Design in progress (July 2013)
On the very fist hill situated behind Mentone it is impossible not to notice a huge neoclassic styled building, the Winter Palace. The complex still holds in his features the memory of the splendor and luxury in which the vacationers, mostly from England, used to live during their winters spent in the ‘’Costa Azzurra’’ or close by in the ‘’Riviera dei Fiori’’.
The gardens that were used most at the time were showing off the ‘’botanic collections’’ that arrived directly from the old and new colonies of the British Empire introducing in the Mediterranean climate plants from Africa, China, central and south America and Australia.
Today in the Winter Palace garden only a pale shadow of what the garden was can still be recognized: the high maintenance costs and new necessities have been the main reasons of a not perfect continuity with the past asset of the garden.
Our project wants to keep at least the essence and the expressivity of the garden in ‘’riviera’’ style without losing track of the necessities and the needs of the tenants.
In order to derign a project that met all the requirements it has been necessary to study examine and survey carefully the existing garden.
The analysis has underlined the strong points but also the weak spots of the area addressing the design in the right direction.
A botanic survey has been completed classifying in the plan all the plants in the garden, defining their number and quality, in order to draft up another vegetation list functioning as a support and a completion for the existing without upsetting it.
