On the coast, a shutter does not age at the same speed as one fitted up at Grasse. A roller shutter by the sea collects a salt deposit that never stops arriving, even when the curtain has not moved for weeks. From the seafront at Cagnes-sur-Mer to the Cap d’Antibes, we see the same faults come back, with the same explanation behind them: the shutter was decent, its fittings were not.
Under the sea wind, a façade never stops working
Sea air is not a breeze, it is an aerosol. The wind tears microscopic droplets off the surface of the water, the water evaporates, and what stays behind is salt crystals settled on everything in front of it: glass, sill, curtain, guide rails, box. Those crystals have an unpleasant property — they pull moisture out of the surrounding air. At night, as humidity rises, they turn back into a liquid, conductive film pressed against the metal. By morning it has all dried. The cycle starts again the following evening, and not one drop of rain is needed. That mechanism, rather than the storms, is what wears out coastal shutters.
When the surface protection has been breached
The curtain itself holds up rather well.
Aluminium does not rust. It does something else: it pits. Small isolated craters eat into the metal wherever the coating has been pierced, scratched or cut through. Seen from the garden the shutter looks perfect. With your nose against the slat you can make out a scattering of dull white spots, sometimes a halo lifting the paint slightly around them.
And it is almost never the curtain that goes first. The trouble declares itself in what surrounds it: brackets, curtain clips, barrel, bearings, locks, screws. No sales leaflet mentions those parts. They are what decides how long the whole thing lasts. One piece of good news in passing: nearly all of them can be changed with the box open, which brings a great many coastal jobs back to a renovation with no building work at all.
Guide rails, seals and brushes
The guide rails gather everything the wind carries. Salt, fine sand, pollen, mineral dust: the mixture packs down into the bottom of the channel and becomes an abrasive paste. The curtain still comes down, but it scrapes, and the movement turns noisy and hesitant at the end of its travel. We regularly take calls about “a tired motor” on seafront flats; the motor is usually in excellent health and the rail is full. The seals and brushes take salt and ultraviolet together: they harden, they let air through, and the salt then reaches the one place it should never get to, inside the box.
The motor strains silently. Nobody hears it wearing out.
Aluminium or PVC against salt: the honest comparison
The question comes up at every appointment along the coast, and it deserves better than a stock answer. This is how we work through it in the workshop, criterion by criterion, before recommending a material.
| Criterion | Powder-coated aluminium | PVC |
|---|---|---|
| Sensitivity to salt | A metal open to attack as soon as the protection is breached; everything rests on the coating | Not a metal, so out of reach of electrochemical corrosion |
| Behaviour under UV | Colour stays stable where the coating has been done properly | More prone to chalking and colour shift in strong shades |
| Wide openings | Wider curtains, better behaviour in wind | More modest sizes, more distortion in heat |
| Observed weak point | Fittings, drilled holes left unprotected, edges cut on site | The metal parts that go with it: barrel, mechanism, screws, fixings |
| Where it belongs | Front-line façades, wide openings, a lasting appearance requirement | Ordinary window sizes on sheltered façades |
“My neighbour fitted PVC and has never had a problem.” We hear that a lot, and it deserves a straight answer. PVC is indeed untroubled by salt. But a PVC shutter is not a shutter without metal: its barrel, its curtain clips and its fixings all are. If those parts come out of a standard batch, that is where the shutter will fail, and the material of the curtain will make no difference. A well-coated, well-equipped aluminium shutter, on the other hand, goes through the years on a seafront without incident. Our roller shutter ranges exist in both materials, and the decision is made opening by opening.
Material does not rescue a badly equipped shutter.
A coastal shutter is judged first on its coating
A coating is not a colour, it is a treatment. How well it lasts depends on what came before the paint: degreasing, surface preparation, curing. Skip the preparation and you get a beautiful profile on delivery, then a patch of lifting paint a few seasons later. Ask for a reinforced treatment for aggressive environments, and have it written on the quotation.
Drilling a coated profile opens a door
Any machining done after coating creates a bare area. A drilled hole, a re-cut edge, a stroke of the file: that is where corrosion starts on a façade at Golfe-Juan. Restoring the protection after cutting is not a refinement, it is the condition for everything else.
Another site habit that costs dearly later: metal shavings left on the sill or dropped into the bottom of the rail after drilling. They oxidise where they lie and mark both the sill and the profile for good. A vacuum and a damp cloth on fitting day is all it takes to avoid that.
Manufacturing to the exact measurements spares most of that cutting in the first place.
Why we talk about screws at the quotation stage
It is the most neglected item in the trade and probably the most decisive one on the coast. An ordinary screw driven into an aluminium bracket brings two different metals together with a salty electrolyte between them: galvanic corrosion sets up at the interface, the joint works loose, and on the day someone has to intervene the screw head crumbles to dust under the bit. Out comes the extractor, the bracket gets damaged, and a ten-minute job becomes half a day. No customer should be paying for that kind of repair on a shutter that is still young.
The points we check, and that you are entitled to ask about:
- screws chosen for a marine environment, not whichever ones were left in the bottom of the toolbox;
- consistency of metals between the screw, the part being fixed and the substrate;
- curtain clips and attachment parts treated as well, not merely painted;
- bearing plates and barrel supports protected through the material rather than on the surface;
- plugs suited to the real substrate, whether concrete, hollow brick or a timber reveal;
- a box left clean at the end of the job, with no filings or offcuts in it.
This level of detail is written down nowhere. It has to be asked of the manufacturer and checked at fitting. On exposed openings around Cagnes-sur-Mer, it is what separates a shutter you forget about from one you have to go back to too soon.
Three levels of exposure, three ways of looking after them
Not every address in the department gets the same treatment. We think in three families.
| Level of exposure | What to watch | What upkeep involves |
|---|---|---|
| Front line facing the sea: the Cagnes-sur-Mer promenade, Saint-Laurent-du-Var, Marina Baie des Anges, the Croisette | Permanent salt deposit, wind carrying sand, screws and clips first in line, seals that harden quickly | Rinsing with clean water far more often, a visual check of the fixings at every clean, rails kept clear |
| Second row, a few streets back: Golfe-Juan, Mandelieu, central Menton, behind the Cap d’Antibes | A real deposit, softened by the buildings; wide variation depending on whether the façade takes the sea wind | Regular rinsing of façades facing the water, rails cleaned, seals watched |
| Inland but close by: La Gaude, Vence, the heights above Cagnes | Occasional salt carried in on windy spells, dust and pollen dominant, sharper temperature swings | Ordinary upkeep, plus a rinse after episodes of sea wind and a check of the rails |
Rinse rather than scrub
The useful gesture is neither polish nor a miracle product. Salt dissolves in water, so you rinse it off, curtain fully down, paying attention to the face that looks out to sea. For the bottom of the rails we use a cloth wrapped round a flat rule or a soft spatula, which reaches the paste of sand in the base of the channel without scratching anything.
- Clean water, curtain down, box and rails included.
- No pressure washer, which drives salt water under the seals and into the box.
- No solvent and nothing chlorinated: mild soapy water, then a rinse.
- Never a metal tool in the rail, never an abrasive pad on a slat.
- With a check of the seals and brushes: suppleness, shrinkage, hardened patches. They are wear parts and they can be replaced.
Which leaves the question of how often.
We refuse to give a calendar, because it would be wrong. A front-line façade facing the sea and taking the wind off the water needs attention that bears no comparison with a flat three streets back sheltered by its neighbours. Two façades of the same building age differently according to which way they look. The reliable guide is not a date, it is the look of the curtain: as soon as a whitish veil starts to show on the slats, or a finger run along the profile comes away chalky, the salt is there.
And motors in a salty environment?
Against everyone’s intuition, fitting a motor protects the shutter. On a motorised unit the tubular motor lives inside the barrel, which sits inside the box: it is one of the best-sheltered parts of the whole assembly. Compare that with a crank handle, whose exit from the box and universal joint stay outside taking the spray all year round.
That argument is rarely heard in a showroom.
Radio control adds a benefit that is quieter still. A wired control point means going through a wall and running a cable; on a coastal façade every hole is a route by which salt-laden damp migrates into the masonry and the box. With a Somfy radio transmitter, io-homecontrol or RTS, or a CAME receiver, that hole disappears. We have covered the differences between the radio technologies and what a Somfy io motor with feedback brings elsewhere; facing the sea, the thing to remember is that one cable less means one hole less.
One last reflex: a stiff shutter should never be forced. Holding the button down on a curtain that is scraping makes the motor work in overload for a problem that water and a cloth would solve.
What coastal owners ask us
Does a roller shutter by the sea cost more?
The extra sits in the surface treatment and the quality of the fittings, not in the principle of the product, and it is worth weighing against the repairs it avoids. What it comes to depends on the façade, which way it faces and how far it is from the water: it goes on a quotation.
Does facing the sea mean aluminium is compulsory?
No. Properly coated aluminium is a very good choice, but PVC keeps its place on ordinary sizes and sheltered façades.
My curtain has little white marks — is it finished?
Rarely. Surface pitting stabilises with consistent rinsing, and a damaged slat or part can be replaced individually on a product made to measure. A survey on site settles whether it is a repair or a replacement.
Can a manual crank be kept on a seafront?
Yes, as long as you accept that the exit from the box and the joint stay exposed, and therefore need watching more closely.
Take stock of your real exposure
Our advice fits in one sentence: decide the level of protection from the façade, never from the catalogue. A due-west opening on the promenade and a courtyard opening in the same building call for neither the same surface treatment, nor the same screws, nor the same upkeep. We manufacture in our workshop at La Gaude, we deliver across the department, and we would rather tell a customer an opening poses no problem than sell them protection they do not need.
Tell us which way your openings face and how far they are from the water, with a photograph of the façade if you can. Ask for a made-to-measure quotation and describe the situation before anyone talks figures. Blind and shutter specialists along the coast consult us the same way for their own coastal jobs.
Front-line seafront property has its own specification. See our page on roller shutters in Villefranche-sur-Mer.
