Villas for rent near the city center on the French Riviera

A village, and sometimes a very small one. The six Var communes served belong to an intercommunal body of 12 villages formed in 2012. The centre of Ramatuelle or Gassin fits into a few lanes around a square, with two or three tables and a grocer. Saint-Tropez's is fuller, with its harbour, its shops and its restaurants, but it stays on a pedestrian scale. The advantage is real: you dine without a car and walk home. So is the trade-off. Out of season a good share of these addresses closes, and the village empties. A spring or autumn stay in the centre of a village in the gulf therefore calls for checking which addresses stay open.

No, they offer a city, which is something other than a busy village. These two Alpes-Maritimes communes each record more than 2 000 property sales a year, which gives a sense of their size and their permanent population. You find shops open in January, daily markets, museums, cinemas, schools and people who work the next morning. A stay in the centre there resembles a stay in a city, with the noise, traffic and constrained parking that implies. In exchange nothing closes, the season barely exists, and a group arriving in November finds the same city as in July, minus the crowd.

Yes, but it plays out at the scale of the street, not the commune. In a village in the gulf, a façade on the square takes the noise of the terraces until midnight in August; 100 m up the same street, nothing carries. In Cannes and Antibes the gap is between a façade on an avenue and one on a courtyard or inner garden. The useful question is therefore what the bedrooms have beneath their windows, and which side they give onto: street or garden. Two neighbouring properties can give completely different nights, and it shows neither in the address nor in the photographs.

Smaller than out of town, and that is the trade particular to this format. Central land is expensive and counted everywhere on this coast. A villa standing there therefore sits on a reduced plot, with a modest pool and an ornamental garden rather than grounds. In the tightest communes, where the median price per square metre passes €23,000, that constraint is mechanical. In exchange you gain what no amount of floor area replaces: going out on foot, not taking the car for bread, letting teenagers walk home in the evening. A group that spends its days out gets its money's worth; a group that lives around the pool should be looking at the hills.