RIVIERA PAVILION.

Design of an extension to a 1930s villa on a secluded hill on the French Riviera makes the most of a wild garden and views of the Mediterranean and its changing moods.

Even when the narcissistic masses and traffic are in season and at their worst all along the coast of the French Riviera, it is possible to escape if you know where to go. The place is full of hidden surprises -- secluded rocky creeks, small villages and villas obscured by pine and cypress, backed into hillsides dropping sheer into the sea. Some are places of breathtaking beauty, tugging at subconscious memories of antique myths.

Such a piece of paradise is the setting for Rudy Ricciotti's extension to a '30s villa at Cap Brun. The villa is surrounded by a hectare of wild garden tumbling down a hill to the blue Mediterranean. To its east side, Ricciotti has stitched a new pavilion, a shell of raw concrete, floored with warm wood, entirely glazed along its south side and looking over lush vegetation to the sea. The exterior of the heavy slab that forms the roof and projects over the glass wall has been planted so that eventually, when the planting is mature and seen from above, the roof will seem part of the garden.

The pavilion gives onto a stone terrace 28m long running parallel to the coastline, and created by extending an existing one. Shaded by two Mediterranean oaks, it is bordered along its edge by a brimming blue-glazed swimming pool that shoots off into the garden.

There is usually about Ricciotti's architectural purity a play on the idea of danger. Here, as in his design of a nautical centre at Bandol (AR July 1998), the language is Modernist: floating horizontals, oversailing deck and dissolving glass wall. But the massive concrete deck seems to loom over the fragile wall and you notice that neither the terrace nor the pool, apparently hovering in mid-air above the trees, has a guard rail or even coping. But the extraordinary view is unobstructed and there are nets placed strategically in wild vines below to catch the unwary who topple over.