What turns up when the house has stood empty for months
On the slopes below the baous, properties sit well apart and screened by pine. The way in is rarely the front door: more often a garden gate levered open, a service door at the back, a sliding window onto a dry-stone terrace that nobody can see from the lane. The front door itself is frequently untouched.
Touch nothing before the police have been. The marks on the timber, the frame and the lock are part of what they record, and an opening already repaired makes that impossible. Photograph from several angles before any work, including the secondary ways in and the access track, then report the crime and notify your insurer within the deadline your policy sets.
If you are far from Vence when you find out, say so. The order of steps does not change, but the temporary securing moves ahead of everything else: boarding a broken pane, a temporary lock, wedging a leaf knocked off its hinges. The house is closed up without erasing what will be needed, and the permanent parts follow afterwards.
The keep, the frame, and what actually gave way
In the houses of the oval the frame is bedded into stone masonry: it is almost never the frame that gives, but the keep and the timber around it, torn out by leverage. Refitting a new mechanism without reworking that area repairs only the half of the problem you can see. A new keep wants sound timber behind it, and in these old Vence walls that sometimes means a resin-set fixing straight into the stone.
On the post-war villas at La Sine or around Saint-Michel it runs the other way: timber or aluminium frames, keeps screwed into soft backing, service doors and garage links weaker than the main entrance. That is where the correction belongs first, rather than adding ironmongery to a door nobody even touched.
If keys have gone missing, the cylinder is replaced without debate — including the garage, the vaulted cellar and the gate, when everything hung on the same ring. Keep the parts that come off: the drilled cylinder, the torn keep, the splinters of frame. An insurer may ask to see them, and they show what kind of attack it was.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our securing your home after a break-in page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Vence.