Roofing and re-roofing on the Cote d'Azur

Most older houses on the coast carry tuiles canal, the curved terracotta barrel tiles laid in overlapping rows on a low-pitch roof. It's a style built for hot, dry summers and mild winters, ill-suited to shedding snow, and it's everywhere from Menton to Cannes. Newer builds sometimes use flatter interlocking tiles, but canal tiles remain the dominant look on anything built before the 1980s and are often required inside historic centres regardless of what you'd prefer.

What you can see from the ground: tiles that have slipped or cracked, usually after one of the violent autumn storms the coast gets in September and October, or a winter gale. A row of tiles sitting slightly out of line, or a gap where one has slid or blown off, is worth acting on quickly, because a single displaced tile lets water into the structure below far faster than the small gap suggests.

What you generally can't see: the underlay beneath the tiles, which degrades with UV and heat cycling over the decades and eventually stops doing its job as the tiles' backup barrier. Zinc gutters and flashings around chimneys and valleys corrode or were undersized to begin with, and that's usually where a "roof leak" starts, more often than in the tiles themselves. The ridge mortar (the pointing that seals the ridge tiles) also cracks and crumbles over time, and it's easy to miss unless someone's up there looking closely.

A roofer who does a proper inspection will check all four of these instead of just glancing at the tile field from a ladder. If your only diagnosis is "it's leaking somewhere," ask for a proper look before anyone commits to a repair plan.

The two figures below cover the two scopes described above. Where your roof falls between them depends on the state of the structure underneath, which you won't know for certain until a roofer has been up there.

What moves the price most inside those ranges: how much structural timber needs replacing, roof access (a steep pitch or a tight street pushes scaffolding cost up), whether you're reusing the existing tiles or buying new ones, and whether sarking insulation is added while the roof is open. A typical Riviera villa roof runs 120 to 150 m², so a full réfection on a mid-size house can land anywhere from roughly 12,000 to 37,500 EUR depending on scope. That's a wide range on purpose: get at least two itemised devis before treating either end of it as your budget.

Plain re-roofing, stripping the old covering and re-laying tiles, is classified as general renovation and repair work, and that sits at 10% TVA. This is the rate that applies to a full réfection with no insulation element, and it's the rate most roofing devis will show.

The 5.5% reduced rate only applies to the insulation element of a job: the insulation panels themselves, the HPV membrane if one's used, and the labour to fit them. Stripping and re-laying the tile covering stays at 10%, even on a job that also includes sarking insulation, unless that strip-and-relay is indispensable to the insulation work itself.

In practice this means a single roofer doing a combined réfection-plus-sarking job should be splitting the devis into at least two lines: one for the insulation at 5.5%, and one for the roofing and covering work at 10%. If your devis shows one undifferentiated line at 10% for a job that includes insulation, ask the installer to break it out. That line-by-line split is the difference between paying 5.5% and 10% on the insulation portion, and on a job with a meaningful insulation component, that's real money left on the table for no reason.

One thing worth saying plainly: don't measure this saving against 20%. Twenty percent was never the rate that would have applied to renovation work on a home over two years old; ten percent was. The saving from getting the insulation portion correctly billed at 5.5% instead of 10% is real, but it's smaller than a lot of French sites imply when they compare against the wrong baseline.