A foreign owner calls about a roof that no longer keeps the rain out. The house near Aix-en-Provence seemed a sound purchase: the price for the nue-propriété (bare ownership) reflected the fact that the seller, an elderly widow, kept the usufruit (usufruct, or life interest) and still lives in the house. Three winters later the roof timbers are sagging, the roofer quotes a five-figure sum for structural work, and each side points at the other. In another file, a British couple who commissioned a full renovation of a Dordogne farmhouse they occupy as usufructuaries discover cracked walls eighteen months after completion, only to learn that the ten-year builder warranty may not belong to them at all. These are not exotic accidents. They are the standard failure points of French split ownership, and they obey rules that surprise most common-law buyers.
French law allows ownership to be divided into two complementary rights, a technique called démembrement de propriété (split ownership). The usufruitier (usufructuary) enjoys the property, lives in it or collects the rent; the nu-propriétaire (bare owner) owns without present enjoyment and recovers full ownership automatically when the usufruct ends. This guide answers the two questions foreign holders ask once the honeymoon is over: who pays for major works, and who can sue the builder when works are defective. The general presentation of split ownership is assumed known; what follows is the dispute end of the subject, with the court decisions that decide these cases.
I. Major Works on a Split Property: Who Pays
A. Routine Upkeep for the Usufructuary, Structure for the Bare Owner
The starting point is the definition itself. Article 578 of the Civil Code provides that “L’usufruit est le droit de jouir des choses dont un autre a la propriété, comme le propriétaire lui-même, mais à la charge d’en conserver la substance.” The usufructuary may enjoy the property as an owner would, but must preserve its substance, and that duty shapes the entire allocation of repair costs. Day-to-day enjoyment carries day-to-day maintenance; the permanent fabric of the building stays with the owner who will one day recover it.
The statute draws the line in two short provisions that every split-ownership file ends up citing. Article 605 of the Civil Code states that “L’usufruitier n’est tenu qu’aux réparations d’entretien.” Only routine maintenance falls on the usufructuary: servicing the boiler, repainting, replacing worn fittings, clearing gutters, keeping the garden. Structural work remains with the bare owner, and Article 606 of the Civil Code defines it restrictively: “Les grosses réparations sont celles des gros murs et des voûtes, le rétablissement des poutres et des couvertures entières.” Load-bearing walls, vaults, beams, full roof coverings, and, by the same article, entire retaining and enclosure walls: everything else is deemed maintenance. A foreign holder should read that list literally. A partial re-roofing or a repair to one slope is often characterised as maintenance and charged to the usufructuary; a complete renewal of the covering is structural and charged to the bare owner. The invoice’s wording matters as much as the work itself, and an ambiguous quote should be clarified in writing before the scaffolding goes up.
Two refinements complete the picture. First, neglect moves the boundary. Article 605 keeps structural repairs on the bare owner only to the extent they were not caused by the usufructuary’s failure to maintain: a roof that collapses because gutters were never cleared for a decade can be charged back to the usufructuary whose omission caused the structural damage. Second, the usufructuary cannot force the bare owner to carry out structural work. Where the roof is failing and the bare owner refuses to act, the usufructuary’s remedy is not an injunction to compel the works but conservation at their own initiative, with recovery governed by the rules examined below. For a foreign bare owner, the mirror risk is timing: the usufruct ends through the paths listed in Article 617 of the Civil Code, most commonly the death of the usufructuary or the expiry of a fixed term, and works paid for shortly before consolidation benefit the incoming full owner without refund unless the accounts were settled in advance. Temporary usufructs granted to persons other than individuals are capped by Article 619 of the Civil Code, which provides that “L’usufruit qui n’est pas accordé à des particuliers ne dure que trente ans.” Institutional investors holding bare ownership under fifteen- to twenty-year schemes should therefore diary both the end date and the state of repair the contract requires at handover, because the last years of a temporary usufruct are when maintenance disputes peak.
B. When Co-ownership Overlaps With the Split: the May 2026 Answer
Matters become technical, and expensive, where split ownership overlaps with co-ownership of the property itself. Consider the frequent family configuration: a surviving spouse holds one quarter in full ownership plus the usufruct of the remainder, while children of a first marriage hold the bare ownership of that remainder. Two bodies of rules then compete for the same roof invoice: the usufruct provisions dividing maintenance from structural work, and the co-ownership provisions governing conservation expenses between co-owners. The Cour de cassation resolved the competition on 20 May 2026 in a dispute between a widow who had paid for roofing works and her stepson, the bare owner of three quarters (Cass. 1st civ., 20 May 2026, No. 24-12.274). The court of appeal had applied only Articles 605 and 606 and dismissed her claim; the Cour de cassation quashed, holding that where co-ownership of the property overlaps with the split, the co-ownership rules apply alongside the usufruct rules. The Court recalled that “lorsqu’un indivisaire a fait des dépenses nécessaires à la conservation d’un bien indivis à l’aide de ses deniers personnels, il a droit à une indemnité”. A co-owner who advances their own money for necessary conservation works is entitled to compensation, and that entitlement survives the presence of a usufruct over part of the property.
The statutory footing is explicit. Article 815-2 of the Civil Code provides that “Tout indivisaire peut prendre les mesures nécessaires à la conservation des biens indivis même si elles ne présentent pas un caractère d’urgence.” Any co-owner may take necessary conservation measures even without urgency, and the same article makes those powers enforceable against a usufructuary where co-owned property is burdened with a usufruct. Complementing it, Article 815-13 of the Civil Code states that “Il doit lui être pareillement tenu compte des dépenses nécessaires qu’il a faites de ses deniers personnels pour la conservation desdits biens, encore qu’elles ne les aient point améliorés.” Necessary conservation expenditure from personal funds must be accounted for even where it added no value. For foreign holders this pairing is the recovery route: pay first where the building requires it, document everything, then claim contribution, rather than letting the property deteriorate while the two sides argue about characterisation.
A companion ruling sets the limit precisely. In a 2022 succession dispute between two brothers whose late mother had kept the usufruct of the family property, one brother sought payment for maintenance works he had carried out over the years, invoking an implied mandate from his co-heirs (Cass. 1st civ., 2 March 2022, No. 20-21.641). The Cour de cassation rejected the claim, holding that “il n’existe pas d’indivision entre l’usufruitier et le nu-propriétaire dont les droits sont de nature différente”. There is no co-ownership between usufructuary and bare owner as such, because their rights are of different natures, so maintenance works owed by the usufructuary cannot be recharged through an alleged mandate from the bare co-owner. Read together, the two decisions draw a clean line that foreign families should internalise. Pure usufruct relations follow Articles 605 and 606 with no cross-billing between the two halves; but as soon as one person cumulates a co-ownership share with usufruct rights, as surviving spouses routinely do, the co-ownership conservation regime of Articles 815-2 and 815-13 opens a second, parallel recovery path. The practical consequence is a paperwork rule: before any major invoice, establish in writing who holds which right over which share, notify both the usufructuary and the bare owner by recorded delivery, and frame the claim under both regimes from the outset rather than discovering the overlap in court years later. Our Paris real estate team regularly structures these dual-basis claims for international families whose French deeds mix full-ownership shares with life interests.
II. Defective Building Works: Who Can Sue the Builder
A. The Ten-Year Warranty Belongs to the Owner, Not the Occupier
The harshest surprise awaits the holder who commissioned works. A foreign buyer who occupies a Provençal farmhouse as usufructuary, orders a full renovation, pays the contractor, and discovers serious cracking two years later naturally assumes they can sue the builder under the famous French ten-year warranty. They cannot, at least not in their own name as usufructuary. Article 1792 of the Civil Code provides that “Tout constructeur d’un ouvrage est responsable de plein droit, envers le maître ou l’acquéreur de l’ouvrage, des dommages, même résultant d’un vice du sol, qui compromettent la solidité de l’ouvrage ou qui, l’affectant dans l’un de ses éléments constitutifs ou l’un de ses éléments d’équipement, le rendent impropre à sa destination.” Strict liability attaches toward the project owner or the purchaser of the structure, categories built around ownership, not enjoyment.
The Cour de cassation applied that logic without concession in a case where a company holding only the usufruct of a commercial building had commissioned steel-framework and cladding works as project owner and then sought to enforce the ten-year warranty against the contractor and its insurer (Cass. 3rd civ., 16 November 2022, No. 21-23.505). The Court held that “L’usufruitier, quoique titulaire du droit de jouir de la chose comme le propriétaire, n’en est pas le propriétaire et ne peut donc exercer, en sa seule qualité d’usufruitier, l’action en garantie décennale que la loi attache à la propriété de l’ouvrage et non à sa jouissance.” The usufructuary, though entitled to enjoy the property as an owner would, is not the owner, and cannot bring the ten-year warranty action that the statute attaches to ownership of the structure rather than to its enjoyment. The appeal court was therefore right to dismiss the warranty claim where the usufructuary company had not even alleged a mandate from the bare owner.
That last reservation contains the solution. The warranty action belongs to the bare owner, who may either bring it directly or give the usufructuary an express written mandate to act on their behalf. Foreign holders should therefore never let a renovation file rest on one signature alone: where the property is split, the works contract, or a separate side mandate, should record that the bare owner authorises the usufructuary to exercise all warranty and insurance rights, including the compulsory project-owner construction insurance whose existence should be verified before works begin. Timing is equally strict, since the ten years run from formal acceptance of the works, and a usufructuary who waits for the bare owner to act may watch limitation expire on a claim neither side filed. Where relations between the two halves are strained, each side should put the other on formal notice as soon as defects appear, and the bare owner should be joined to any proceedings before limitation becomes an issue. A usufructuary who commissioned and paid for defective works is not without rights, but those rights must be routed through ownership, by mandate or by joining the owner, and files organised on that basis from the first crack succeed where files built on enjoyment alone fail.
B. The Contract Route, the Company Meeting and the File to Build Now
The same 2022 decision preserves what it refuses on the warranty front. The usufructuary company had also sued on ordinary contractual liability as the contractor’s own contracting party, and on that branch the Cour de cassation quashed the dismissal: a usufructuary bound to the builder by a works contract keeps standing to claim for all defects, including structurally serious ones, on the contractor’s general contractual liability. The distinction is decisive in practice. The ten-year warranty action, with its strict presumption in the owner’s favour, is closed to the lone usufructuary; the contractual action, which requires proof of fault and causation under the contract, remains open to whoever actually signed the works contract and paid the price. Foreign holders who commissioned renovations should therefore keep the full contractual file, signed contract with technical specifications, stage-payment records, acceptance report with reservations, and all correspondence about defects, because their personal claim against the builder will be argued on that contract, while the parallel warranty claim must be brought by or with the bare owner. Running both actions together, each by its proper claimant, is how split-ownership defect files are won; running only one, by the wrong claimant, is how they are lost on standing before the merits are even examined.
Where the property is held through a company, a further standing trap awaits at the meeting table. Many foreign families own French property through a société civile immobilière (SCI, family property company) whose shares are themselves split between usufruct and bare ownership. In a 2022 ruling concerning such a company, the Cour de cassation confirmed that the usufructuary of company shares cannot claim shareholder status, which belongs to the bare owner alone, but must be allowed to force a shareholder decision on any question directly affecting their right of enjoyment (Cass. 3rd civ., 16 February 2022, No. 20-15.164). In that case the usufructuaries had not shown that the proposed meeting topic directly affected their enjoyment, so their request for a court-appointed convenor failed, but the principle stands and foreign holders should use it. A usufructuary of SCI shares who needs major works voted, a builder claim authorised, or insurance taken out should demand in writing that the manager convene the shareholders on that precise question, demonstrating in the demand itself how the matter directly affects their enjoyment of the property. A bare owner who manages the company and ignores such a demand creates the very paper trail that later supports court intervention, while articles of association that allocate voting rights expressly between the two halves avoid the confrontation entirely. Before buying into a split-share SCI, foreign investors should read the statutes on voting, approval of transfers, and allocation of works costs as carefully as the price, because these clauses decide who can authorise repairs and who can instruct counsel when defects appear.
The tax signal completes the file without replacing tax advice. Splitting and transferring usufruct interests has registration consequences measured by statute: Article 669 of the General Tax Code provides that “la valeur de la nue-propriété et de l’usufruit est déterminée par une quotité de la valeur de la propriété entière”, with each half valued as a fixed proportion of the whole according to the usufructuary’s age. And transfers of company shares themselves attract proportional registration duty, since Article 726 of the General Tax Code states that “Les cessions de droits sociaux sont soumises à un droit d’enregistrement dont le taux est fixé” by the paragraphs that follow. The boundary between those two regimes was tested where members of a family property company transferred the temporary usufruct of their shares for twenty years, and the administration sought to tax the transaction as a share transfer (Cass. com., 30 November 2022, No. 20-18.884). The Commercial Chamber quashed without remand, holding that “l’usufruitier de parts sociales ne peut se voir reconnaître la qualité d’associé, qui n’appartient qu’au nu-propriétaire, de sorte que la cession de l’usufruit de droits sociaux ne peut être qualifiée de cession de droits sociaux”. A transfer of mere usufruct over shares, conferring enjoyment without shareholder status, is not a share transfer for duty purposes. Foreign families reorganising holdings between generations should take the point in both directions: the favourable characterisation depends on the transaction genuinely transferring only enjoyment, documented as such, and aggressive paperwork that blurs enjoyment with ownership invites the reassessment this taxpayer defeated.
Whatever the configuration, the evidence file follows the same checklist, and building it early decides more cases than legal creativity later. Commission an independent bailiff’s report (constat d’huissier) at the first sign of structural trouble, before any repair alters the scene. Obtain two detailed written quotes distinguishing maintenance items from structural items in Article 606 terms, so the allocation debate starts from documents rather than memories. Notify both halves in parallel by recorded delivery, framing demands under both the usufruct provisions and, where any overlap exists, the co-ownership conservation provisions. Verify the existence and scope of project-owner construction insurance for any works less than ten years old, calendar the acceptance date from which the ten years run, and secure the bare owner’s written mandate for warranty action where you hold only enjoyment. Finally, keep succession and estate consequences in a separate exercise: who pays for the roof today and how each half is taxed on death in each relevant jurisdiction are different questions, answered from different files, and mixing them is how international families lose twice. Further background on conveyancing and ownership structures is available on our Paris real estate law page.
Conclusion
Major works and defective works are where French split ownership stops being a clever acquisition structure and becomes a litigation map. The usufructuary maintains and preserves the substance but cannot compel the bare owner to rebuild the structure; the bare owner funds the structure but enjoys nothing until consolidation; where a co-ownership share overlaps with the usufruct, the May 2026 ruling opens a parallel recovery path under the co-ownership conservation provisions; the ten-year builder warranty belongs to ownership and must be exercised by or with the bare owner, while the usufructuary who signed the works contract retains a contractual claim in their own name; and the usufructuary of company shares is no shareholder but can force decisions directly affecting enjoyment. None of these outcomes depends on goodwill between the two halves. Each depends on deeds that allocate costs expressly, mandates that route warranty rights correctly, meetings that authorise action, and evidence gathered before repairs erase it. Foreign holders who organise the file on those lines convert an apparently weak position, occupying or waiting without full ownership, into enforceable claims against co-holders, builders and insurers. Those who rely on informal understandings discover, usually at the price of a roof, that French courts enforce the boundary between enjoyment and ownership exactly where the statutes drew it.
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If your French property held in usufruct or bare ownership needs major works or shows building defects, a telephone consultation with one of our lawyers within 48 hours can clarify who pays, who can sue, and what to document first. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page with a short description of your situation.