Since 1974
and the story continues
Digital archive
Groupe BECI was born in Dunkerque in 1974, founded by four brothers in a town that had only just finished rebuilding itself. Half a century on, the company is still family-owned and still run from the Côte d’Opale. That is a structural fact, not a line from a brochure: it explains why the group goes back into its own buildings ten years after handing them over, why it keeps part of what it builds, and why it talks about property with a human face without turning the phrase into a slogan.
Reinventing, here, does not mean starting again from scratch. It means taking on a brownfield site rather than opening up a field, slipping a medical centre beneath flats, bringing disused baths back into service, setting a retirement scheme against the town centre instead of relegating it to the outskirts. The environmental transition is not a separate chapter of the job: it is the land you choose, the materials you use, the lifespan you build for. Thirty schemes give the exact measure of it here.
1974 → 2026 · Scroll to move along the timeline
Dunkerque
Four brothers found a building firm in Dunkerque. The town has only just come out of thirty years of reconstruction: more than two thirds destroyed during the war, it was rebuilt in concrete, on a grid and in a hurry. It is that context — a town that had to remake everything — that gives the group its first instinct: build for people you know, in a town where you stay. Fifty years on, the company is still family-owned and still based in Dunkerque.
Dunkerque · Malo-les-Bains · Gravelines
Before it was a developer, BECI was a builder on the Côte d’Opale. The territory is narrow and precise: Dunkerque and its outskirts, Malo-les-Bains and its promenade, Gravelines and its ramparts, Saint-Omer and Berck a little further off. You build here with the wind, the sand and a low raking light that forgives no slapdash façade. It is these years, with no spectacular archive to show for them, that build the know-how: the address book of local trades, the knowledge of the ground, the habit of running into your clients at Saturday market.
Calais · Dunkerque · Longuenesse · Coquelles
Somewhere in those years the group notices that the coast is short of something other than housing: premises to work in. EUROCAP grows out of that observation and develops a product that is unspectacular and very useful — the business park, with its adaptable workshop units, let to trades and small firms and managed directly, with no middleman. Calais, Dunkerque, Longuenesse, then Coquelles: four parks that fund what comes next and that teach the group a trade it will never let go of, that of long-term owner. You do not build a building you are going to sell in the same way as a building you are going to keep for thirty years.
Flandre and Côte d’Opale
Two brands complete the chain. STILNOR moves upstream: buying land, servicing it, laying out streets and dividing plots — in other words deciding the shape of a neighbourhood before a single house exists. ONE HOME moves downstream and builds those houses, one at a time, for families who are often buying the project of a lifetime. Between the two, the group now controls the whole journey from the field to the letterbox. It is also in this period that the vocabulary of the house settles in — a roof over your head, a little patch of ground — a familiar tone that has never left it.
Dunkerque, Grand Large quarter
Dunkerque decides to open its town back on to the water: the Grand Large, a stretch of port land caught between the dock and the sea, becomes a place to live. Nicolas Michelin draws gabled buildings there that quote the harbour houses without ever copying them; the gables of the Grand Large will earn his practice a special mention in the 2010 Équerre d’argent prize. For BECI it means ten thousand square metres and one hundred and fifty-four homes — but above all a first collaboration with an architect of national standing on a closely watched scheme. Nothing was ever quite the same afterwards.
Métropole européenne de Lille
The group crosses the forty kilometres that separate Dunkerque from Lille. It is further than it looks: the metropolitan area has its own rules, its own practices, its industrial brownfield sites and a pressure on land that the coast knows nothing about. BECITY Nord sets up there in 2015 and learns major refurbishment as much as new build — taking on an existing building calls for a different kind of patience from building on a clear site. Twelve schemes now carry that signature across the metropolitan area, from intimate housing to a nine-thousand-square-metre office building.
Anglet · Lacanau
In 2018 BECITY establishes itself in Nouvelle-Aquitaine: the Basque coast first, with Anglet, then the Gironde shoreline, with Lacanau. Two places where the question is not building more but building right, between tourist pressure, the scarcity of land and the demands of the landscape. The vocabulary changes — timber, cast shade and orientation take the place of brick and shelter from the north wind — but the standard stays the same. Three schemes have come out of the ground there in less than ten years.
Amiens
Amiens is neither Flandre nor the Lille metropolitan area: it is Picardie, another brick, another rhythm, a city of water and gardens. The group opens a fourth office there for a single scheme — forty-nine homes and a shop, entrusted to a practice from Amiens. It is very little, and that is precisely the method: you do not arrive in a place with a catalogue, you arrive with one project and an architect from here.
Four regions
Fifty years after it was founded, the group completes in a single year TRACKS in Lille, BABYLONE in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, EKLA and BIGUEYRIE in Anglet, MÉROVÉE in Saint-Omer. Four regions, five schemes, one house — and still the same family at the helm, which remains rare in a trade where groups change shareholder every ten years. The anniversary falls just as the industry is reconfiguring itself: rising land costs, restraint in land take, reuse, brownfield conversion. So many constraints that the group was already practising without needing to name them.
Gravelines
At Gravelines, between Vauban’s fortified town and the marina, the largest scheme in the group’s history is taking shape: nearly twenty-four thousand square metres, a little under thirteen hundred homes, flats, semi-detached homes, houses, a retirement development and shops. This is no longer a building, it is a quarter — with everything that implies in terms of long timescales, consultation and responsibility. Detailed design is under way, with completion targeted for 2029. Fifty-five years after a first Dunkerque building firm, twenty kilometres down the coast.
Reinventing.
The Lille metropolitan area and BECITY have been a love story since 2015, and it has produced a great many fine schemes! Between new-build projects and major refurbishments, BECITY has honed its craft on the home ground of the Flemish capital.
Breaking the mould.
In the south-west, wine is not the only thing that improves with age! Ideas and values do too. Established here since 2018, BECITY has delivered varied and ambitious schemes across the region — short-stay accommodation, offices and houses, from the Basque coast to the Médoc shoreline.
Cultivating what matters.
On the Côte d’Opale there are long dune-backed beaches to stop the waves… and BECITY’s roots! This is where it all began, with the first property schemes. BECITY has since found other horizons, without ever forgetting the values of the people here.
Prendre pied.
In Amiens the group has a single scheme — and that is exactly as it should be. You do not turn up in Picardie with a catalogue: you turn up with one project, an architect from here, and the wish to understand a city of water and gardens before laying the first brick.
Thirty schemes, their architects, their floor areas and how far along they are. The collection can be browsed as plates or as an index.
30 schemes shown
Nearly nine thousand square metres in a single block, where offices take most of the scheme without confiscating the ground floor: shops at street level, homes above. Post Architectes take on the large Lille scale here — the scale of railway land and workshop halls — by cutting it into registers that can be read from the pavement. Completed in 2024, TRACKS wagers that a workplace can remain a piece of city.
Eleven hundred square metres for a higher-education school: the brief is modest, the standard is not. O Architectes deliver a compact teaching building, designed around the movement of students rather than around a façade for show. Since 2021 it has completed the constellation of schools that makes Lille a student city before it is an office city.
One hundred and twenty homes in Mouvaux, a town on the Roubaix fringe where brick and garden still lay down the law. Rather than a slab block, Agence Poète and Anne Beuque broke the scheme into low volumes linked by planted walkways: it is that division, and nothing else, that makes the idea of a village in the city credible. Completed in 2023.
Fifteen homes on a little over a thousand square metres: this is urban mending rather than large-scale building. Béal & Blanckaert and Anne Beuque work to the dimensions of the neighbouring fabric — the set-back, the brick, the eaves height — so that the insertion is beyond argument. Completed in 2022.
A small office building doubled with a restaurant, which is enough to change the nature of the scheme: the ground floor becomes public. Post Architectes are working with fewer than one thousand three hundred square metres, calibrated for a Lille address and not for a business park. Planning permission has been granted; construction still lies ahead.
Twenty-six homes in Wasquehal, a town in the metropolitan area where a few now-rare timber-framed farmhouses survive. Dehaene + Partenaires take up the motif without aping it: the timber frame becomes the structuring grid of the façade, not applied decoration. Sales launch in the last quarter of 2025.
One hundred and ninety-six student flats in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, a short metro ride from the Cité scientifique campus. Avant Propos treated the building as a collective one and not as a stack of studios: wide circulation, a retail unit at street level to tie the hall of residence back into the neighbourhood. Completed in 2024.
Twelve homes and business units in Croix, on a plot too narrow for grand composition. REH-Architecture and MOEBE preferred adjustment: height aligned with the neighbouring buildings, workspace below, homes above, nothing more. On site, completion in 2026.
Sixteen homes arranged around a courtyard in Faches-Thumesnil, on the southern edge of Lille. Zita Architectes make the void the subject of the scheme: it is the patio that gives access, that brings in the light and that puts neighbours in touch without obliging them to cross paths. Completed in 2022.
Sixteen homes in Wasquehal, a town that the metro and the river Marque connect to Lille without costing it its suburban scale. GBL Architectes hold a quiet contemporary line here, with no overplayed materials and no attention-seeking gesture. Completed in 2018.
Three thousand two hundred square metres of offices in Lille, at the junction of two of the routes that structure the city. Post Architectes work the depth of the floorplate rather than the effect of the façade: a regular grid, a generous floor-to-ceiling height, the capacity to be re-partitioned without being disfigured. That is the most honest definition of a durable office building; this one has held since 2018.
Thirteen homes on seven hundred and twenty-five square metres: a corner scheme, as the name says, where everything turns on the way the street is turned. D’Houndt + Bajart handle the corner in solid material, in the brick tradition of the Nord, with the shifts in the grid that are the Tourcoing practice’s signature. On site.
In Anglet, between Bayonne and Biarritz, offices are usually built as boxes set down along the ring roads. Craft Architecture do the opposite: nearly three thousand square metres of offices and shops treated with depth, with usable outdoor space and real attention paid to shade — which, in this climate, is less a matter of comfort than of common sense. Completed in 2024.
Eight houses in Anglet, on less than eight hundred square metres of built floor area: gentle density, the kind that cannot be seen from the street. Craft Architecture repeat one simple volume, shifting it each time, so that every house keeps its garden and its light without looking into next door. Completed in 2024.
Lacanau lives to the rhythm of the ocean and the seasons; building here means working with the pine, the sand and the westerly wind. Craft Architecture set out sixteen homes and a shop in the form of a villa rather than a block, the name looking back to the seaside houses of the early twentieth century. Planning application under determination.
Les Bains Dunkerquois is an address before it is a scheme: the name stayed in the town’s memory long after the use died out. Nathalie T’Kint, a conservation architect, proposes bringing it back as a hotel and restaurant across nearly six thousand square metres — a conversion, never a rebuild. Planning application still to be submitted.
On the Grand Large, between the dock and the sea, Nicolas Michelin drew a family of gabled buildings that take up the silhouette of the harbour houses without ever imitating them. One hundred and fifty-four homes, ten thousand square metres: this is the scheme that changed the scale of a developer until then confined to Dunkerque, in a quarter whose gabled blocks earned the practice a special mention at the 2010 Équerre d’argent. Completed the same year.
Malo-les-Bains has kept from its seaside calling a promenade, a stock of villas and a light that belongs to it alone. Thirty-three homes are enough to make a piece of seafront: Agence Wiel worked the orientations and the balconies more than the façade, because what you live in here, first of all, is a horizon. Completed in 2016.
Twelve thousand square metres in the middle of Dunkerque: a serviced retirement development of one hundred and twenty-nine apartments, and fifty-seven ordinary homes on the same site. Combining the two is a choice, not a constraint of the plan — the retirement scheme is not banished to the outskirts, it stays within walking distance of the theatre and the library. Completed in 2020.
The largest scheme the group has ever taken on: nearly twenty-four thousand square metres in Gravelines, between Vauban’s fortified town and the marina. Flats, semi-detached homes, houses, a retirement development and shops — an entire quarter, which Santer Vanhoof organise around the water rather than in a single gesture. Detailed design under way, completion targeted for 2029.
Twelve homes in Malo-les-Bains, within the fabric of villas that lines the promenade and the Perroquet dunes. Dominique Bail Architecture take the word “villa” seriously: a single volume, a frank contemporary hand, and the domestic scale that the neighbourhood imposes on anyone who wants to build there. Completed in 2021.
Nine homes and a medical centre in Leffrinckoucke, a dune-bound town wedged between Dunkerque and the Belgian border. The brief says the essential about an area that is ageing and short of doctors: you live above the surgery, and the surgery stays in the village. Atelier d’Art et Architecture Laurent Legrand completed it in 2021.
One villa and fourteen apartments: the combination is rare, and it makes it possible to keep a house where everything could have been cleared. Designed by Sockeel Architecte and built by Archifix, the scheme stakes its claim in Malo-les-Bains on the planting at high level that its name announces. On site, completion in 2026.
Eleven homes and a retail unit in Berck-sur-Mer, a Côte d’Opale resort known for its kites and its seaside hospitals. DVA Architecture give every flat an outdoor space — balcony, loggia or terrace — which, facing the westerly wind, takes more care than it appears. Completed in 2020.
Ninety-four apartments for a retirement development in Dunkerque, won in competition by Del Medico Vandaële. Five thousand one hundred and forty-four square metres: enough for a real collective life, few enough that no one gets lost in it. Completion announced for late 2027.
Fifty-two homes and an outpatient centre in Cappelle-la-Grande, in the first ring around Dunkerque. Archifix and François-Xavier Fosse, winners of the competition, give every home an outdoor space and attach care to housing instead of exiling it to a zone of its own. Completion in 2026.
Six thousand square metres of offices in Coudekerque-Branche, at the gates of Dunkerque and its industrial port hinterland. Creanor extends Eurocap’s expertise in business parks, but with the urban hand of D’Houndt + Bajart: a business park willing to look like a piece of city. Now selling, completion in 2026.
Forty-nine homes and a shop in Amiens, the group’s only Picardie scheme and the reason BECITY Picardie exists. Gasnier Gossart, an Amiens practice, work the relationship to the garden that the name announces — a motif never taken lightly in a city that owes its floating market gardens to the same obsession. On site, completion in 2025.
Two hundred and twenty-two rooms, a restaurant, a dojo and a coworking space: the brief belongs more to the contemporary inn than to the conventional hall of residence. The name announces the urban function intended — to be a landmark — and Santer Vanhoof carry it through in a volume of nearly six thousand square metres. Completion expected in 2027.
Twenty-eight homes in Saint-Omer, a town of brick and water whose old centre has been patiently repaired over the last twenty years. Del Medico Vandaële set down a development at human scale whose upper floors look out over the marais audomarois — the last market-garden marsh still cultivated in France. Completed in 2024.
No scheme exists without the people who draw it. These are the architectural practices that held the pencil.
Anne Beuque Architecte
Archifix
Atelier d’Art et d’Architecture Laurent Legrand
Beal et Blanckaert Architectes
Del Medico Vandaële Architectes
DVA Architecture
MOEBE
O Architectes
REH-Architecture
Agence Poète Architecte
Agence Wiel Architecte
Anne Beuque Architecte
Archifix
Atelier d’Art et d’Architecture Laurent Legrand
Beal et Blanckaert Architectes
Del Medico Vandaële Architectes
DVA Architecture
MOEBE
O Architectes
REH-Architecture
From building land to lettings management, the group covers the whole chain.
Property development
BECITY is the group’s development arm: it buys the land, puts the scheme together, chooses the architect and carries the project through to handover. Housing, offices, student or retirement living, hotels, healthcare — the brand has never specialised in a single product, it has specialised in a relationship to place. Four offices now cover the Côte d’Opale, the Lille metropolitan area, Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Picardie.
See on groupebeci.comBusiness parks
EUROCAP designs, builds and manages business parks: workshop, storage and service buildings conceived for the trades and small firms that keep a local economy running. The model is simple and it has held for decades: adaptable units, transparent rents, hands-on local management. Four parks carry the name, at Calais, Dunkerque, Longuenesse and Coquelles.
See on groupebeci.comBusiness park
CREANOR is the next-generation business park: six thousand square metres at Coudekerque-Branche, at the gates of Dunkerque, designed by D’Houndt + Bajart. What the brand is trying to demonstrate comes down to one sentence — an out-of-town workplace can have architecture, shared spaces and an address.
See on groupebeci.comLand promotion & serviced plots
STILNOR works upstream of everything else: finding the land, servicing it, dividing it, negotiating with the local authority and delivering plots ready to build on. It is the least visible trade in the group and one of the most decisive, because this is where the shape of a neighbourhood is settled — the width of the streets, the place of the trees, the size of the plots.
See on groupebeci.comIndividual homes
ONE HOME builds individual houses, one at a time, for families who are often buying the project of a lifetime. The company works both on land serviced by STILNOR and on isolated plots, with adjustable house types rather than a fixed catalogue. Within the group it is the most direct trade of all: one client, one plot, one roof.
See on groupebeci.comSales & lettings
The group’s estate agency sells and lets, both the new-build schemes signed BECITY and second-hand property. Its real function goes beyond marketing: it is the agency that tells the developer what the market actually wants, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, and that keeps in touch with the buyer once the keys have been handed over.
See on groupebeci.comAsset & property management
Once a building is handed over, it has to be kept alive: tracking the leases, deciding on the works, steering the value of an estate over twenty years. BECI Asset & Property Management covers both roles, strategic on the asset side and operational on the building side, for the group’s offices and business parks as well as for third parties.
See on groupebeci.comBlock & lettings management
BECI Gestion looks after the day-to-day: block management, lettings, service-charge meetings, façade repairs and roof leaks. It is the trade that obliges the group to go back into its own buildings ten or twenty years after building them — the best school of modesty there is for a developer.
See on groupebeci.comLong-term ownership
Foncière BECI holds and keeps the assets the group has chosen to retain rather than sell. It is the counterweight to the developer’s trade: where development is settled at handover, ownership commits you over time and obliges you to build what you are prepared to live with for a long while.
See on groupebeci.com