Un toit-terrasse à Cannes

The roof came with the apartment, and for years it stayed exactly as the builders left it: flat grey concrete, a low parapet, and the boxes and pipes every roof carries. The view was already extraordinary. Nobody went up there anyway.

That is the thing about a bare roof. It is not unpleasant so much as unfinished — nowhere to sit that feels like sitting somewhere, nothing at eye level but other people's buildings, and a hard edge you instinctively keep away from. So it probably gets used twice a summer, and the best surface in the home stays empty.

The change came from wrapping the roof rather than building on it. The same Aluwood panel, run vertically, does four separate jobs up here — and that is why the terrace reads as one room instead of a collection of garden furniture.

It clads the parapet, so the edge you used to avoid became a warm boundary you can sit against. It forms a full-height screen along the neighbouring building line, so the space closes itself off at eye level. It wraps the outdoor kitchen, so the run of cabinets looks built in rather than bolted on. And it encloses the plant and services, so the least attractive part of any roof simply disappears into the design.

Every top edge and outside corner is capped in black aluminium profiles from the same range. That detail is quiet, and it is most of the reason the finish reads as architecture rather than decking screwed to a wall.

Sink, plancha, grill, and a dark worktop running the length of the far side. The cabinets underneath are clad in the same slats as the wall behind them, which is a small decision that does a lot of work: the kitchen stops looking like an appliance parked outdoors and starts looking like part of the building.

This is the part that surprises people. Downlights are mounted straight onto the slats, spaced right around the terrace, with a concealed strip under the kitchen worktop and along the low wall.

After dark, the cladding stops being a surface and becomes the light source. Each fitting throws a narrow wash down the battens, the shadow gaps between them do the rest, and the whole roof turns warm from the walls inwards. No floodlight, no lamp posts, nothing pointed at anyone's eyes. It is the difference between a terrace you use until sunset and one you sit on until midnight.

Aluwood is thermo-treated Nordic pine on an aluminium carrier. The wood is what you see and touch — real grain, real knots, a warm brown that shifts with the light through the day. The aluminium is what you never think about again: it is the part that holds the shape and takes the weather, so the facade does not need the sanding, oiling and re-oiling that a timber screen asks for every couple of years.

The panels come 240 cm long and 45.1 cm wide, and get cut to fit the run. The black profiles finish the top edges, the outside corners and the ends. Aluwood is patent-protected in the EU and carries a CE Declaration of Performance, both published on the product pages if you or your architect want the paperwork.

For a project like this the argument is not that it goes up quickly, though it does. It is that a faster, simpler install is fewer hours on someone's invoice — and that nobody has to come back and maintain it.