What holds a safe, and what gives it away
An unfixed safe leaves with the intruder: fifty kilos go down the stairs between two people, and it is opened elsewhere, unhurried and unseen. Anchoring is therefore not a detail of the installation. In a Croisette flat left empty out of season, it is the only thing standing between the box and a quiet removal.
The choice between setting in and bolting on is settled by the wall. Suquet houses have thick stone walls, but cutting a recess into one calls for method and a careful making good. The 1960s and 1970s blocks in La Bocca offer concrete that takes anchors cleanly. The lightweight linings added during recent refurbishments hold nothing at all.
Siting matters as much as fixing. Bedroom, dressing room and study are searched first. Damp deserves attention too: a cellar near the Vieux-Port or a garden-level room exposed to sea spray suits neither documents nor digital media. For a shop on rue d’Antibes, the safe stays out of customers’ sight, in a room with controlled access.
Your insurance policy decides before you do
It is your policy that sets the amount covered for valuables kept at home, and it frequently makes that cover conditional on a minimum level of resistance and on fixing carried out as the manufacturer specifies. Read it first: the contract determines the safe you buy, not the other way round. On a Cannes flat occupied a few weeks a year, around the Festival and the congresses, the clause on unoccupied periods deserves close attention.
Resistance to forced entry and resistance to fire are two separate qualifications, and a safe may well have only one of them. For family papers or backup drives kept in a La Californie villa, both are needed at once, and the protection time quoted applies only to the type of contents it was tested for.
A safe occasionally closes on its owner: a code forgotten over a season away, a flat battery in an electronic lock, a lost key. Opening one calls for strict identification and proof that the safe is yours. Keep the documentation and the serial number somewhere other than inside the safe. For a home shut from October to Easter, common between the Petit Juas heights and the Croisette, those references sit better with someone who stays in town than in a drawer of the empty flat.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our safes page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Cannes.