The insurance policy decides before the model does
EN 1143-1 grades safes by their resistance to attack, and it is your policy that sets the grade required for the sum you want covered at home. Read it before buying anything. A house at Tournamy lived in all year and a villa closed for the whole winter do not fall under the same clauses, and the wording on non-occupancy repays careful reading.
Fire resistance belongs to a separate standard and is a separate question: a burglary-resistant safe is not necessarily fireproof. For title deeds, a notarial document or digital backups left in a house shut up all winter above the Valmasque woods, the two requirements usually have to be met together.
Anchoring, finally, is almost always an explicit condition below a certain weight. A fifty-kilo safe standing in a dressing room is carried out by two people and opened elsewhere at leisure. On a property at the end of a lane at Font de Currault, where nobody hears anything, that precaution is not theoretical.
The wall that holds it, and where you put it
In the village houses, stone load-bearing walls give solid backing for a built-in safe, but the real thickness has to be probed: between narrow floors you also meet thin cross-walls and partitions put up when the house was divided. The opening is planned, never improvised. Probing beforehand saves cutting into an old village wall for nothing at all.
In the villas of Font de Currault, Val de Mougins or Les Bréguières you find block and concrete instead, which suit a free-standing safe bolted to both floor and wall. Avoid the garage and the plant room: damp there ruins documents and digital media, and those are rooms you open to other people.
In a Val de Mougins villa as in a village house, position matters as much as the model. Main bedroom, dressing room, study: those are the first places searched, and they are searched fast. When the house is left in someone else's care while you are away — caretaker, cleaner, grounds and pool maintenance — a safe kept out of the rooms they pass through avoids putting its contents on show. Discretion applies to fitting day too, when the house stands open.
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 Mougins.