Start with the policy, not with the showroom
It is the insurance policy that sets how much is covered for valuables kept at home, and often the minimum grade required for that amount. EN 1143-1 grades resistance to attack, EN 1047 deals with fire, and the two do not overlap. Read your schedule of cover before settling on a model in a shop.
Needs are not the same from one end of the town to the other. A workshop or a gallery in the centre keeps a day's takings and a few collection pieces; a boat owner berthed at port Camille Rayon keeps ship's papers and spare keys; a house lived in two months a year is mostly protecting documents left behind.
The format follows from that. A small discreet volume for papers, a wider padded one for fragile pieces just out of the kiln, a deposit slot for a shop in the centre taking cash all season without reopening the safe each time. What you keep decides the model, not the other way round.
Anchoring depends on what sits behind the render
In the old town the walls are old masonry, sometimes irregular rubble stone: the anchorage is excellent, but it calls for probing first and for fixings suited to what is really behind the plaster. A chase for a wall safe has to be planned in advance, all the more in a terraced house where the wall is shared with the neighbour.
On the seafront, the 1960s and 1970s flats line up light partitions between the rooms. Fixing a safe to one of those makes no sense: you look for the loadbearing wall, often the one along the corridor or the stairwell. An unfixed safe is carried out by two people, goes down in the lift and is opened elsewhere at leisure.
Avoid the garage and the cellar, both common in the Golfe-Juan seaside blocks: damp, salt spray and swings in temperature ruin documents, photographs and digital media. Avoid the bedroom and the dressing room too, searched first and searched fast. And keep the safe's paperwork, serial number included, somewhere other than inside the safe.
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 Vallauris.