A roller shutter in Vence is not chosen the way one is chosen in central Nice. On the hillsides of the Loup valley, the housing is villas, wide openings turned towards the view, thick walls and sloping ground. Those conditions decide the curtain, the box, the motor and the colour, often before the budget does.
Hillside housing sets its own rules
From Vence to Roquefort-les-Pins, by way of Saint-Jeannet, Gattières, Tourrettes-sur-Loup, La Colle-sur-Loup and Le Rouret, the styles cross with no apparent logic: restored farmhouses, bastides, estate villas from decades past, contemporary houses set on old terraces. The way people live, on the other hand, barely varies. You open wide onto the landscape, you live outdoors from the first warm days, and the main façade faces south or west rather than the road. So the openings to be fitted are wider than elsewhere, more exposed, and almost never identical from one room to the next.
Up here, the standard window does not exist.
Every opening is its own case
A two-panel slider in the living room, a pocket door onto the terrace, a small opening in a gable, an arch kept in an old wall: on one villa we rarely receive two identical dimensions. It is the most ordinary reason to manufacture to measure, and the most decisive.
Access counts as much as the dimension
Hill lanes were not laid out for long loads. A hairpin gate, a tight bend above a gully, a flight of terrace steps to reach the lower patio: handling a wide curtain has to be planned, or it is paid for in kinked edges and twisted rails. We ask about access at the survey, before signing off a bulky monobloc box.
Wide openings: what decides the curtain and the motor
This is the subject that comes up most often in this area. A wide shutter is not a small shutter scaled up.
The weight of the curtain and how it holds its line
The wider the opening, the heavier the curtain and the more it wants to sag when it is down. The fault shows itself at once: a belly in the middle of the curtain, rubbing on one side, a thread of light on the other. Four parameters are settled together.
- The material. On wide openings, insulated aluminium gives a better stiffness-to-weight ratio than PVC, which keeps its place on ordinary windows.
- Slat height and thickness. A taller, thicker slat limits deflection. Our VT40, VT50 and VTEX50 ranges, like the VM43 and VM55 monoblocs, are built out to cover these cases.
- Guidance and reinforcement. Suitable rails, reinforcement at the bottom, automatic locks: on an exposed opening, good guidance is worth as much as a good curtain.
- The roll diameter. A thick curtain needs a box sized for it, and on a renovation that is often what decides between the options.
An undersized curtain cannot be rescued with a bigger motor.
The motor comes afterwards, never first
Torque is chosen on the real weight of the curtain as manufactured, with margin, and not on the average of a range. A motor that is only just adequate can be heard starting, runs hot, and gives up one winter morning. We work with Somfy motors (Oximo, Altus, io-homecontrol, RTS) and CAME radio motors, which leaves a wide spread of torques available; the job is to pick the right one, not the most common one. On very wide openings, a soft stop and obstacle detection are a matter of daily comfort as much as longevity. Our comparison of Somfy and CAME radio motors sets out the differences between the control technologies.
Consumer unit a long way off?
In a villa, the opening to be motorised is often at the far end of the house from the consumer unit, in an extension or a room added later. Running a line means chasing walls, making good the render, a job out of all proportion for one shutter. A solar motor settles it with no cable at all, and radio control adds control points without touching the walls. On a clear south or west façade it is the first solution we put on the table.
Full southern sun, and wind coming down the valley
Break the heat before it gets in
The most effective protection is still the one that stops the radiation before the glass. Closing partly through the hardest hours and opening again as the air cools is a simple habit, but nobody repeats it every day if it means going upstairs to work a strap. That is where a motor and a time programme earn their place, since they look after the south façade while the house is empty. Some rooms want the opposite. A south-facing kitchen or study needs light even with the shutter down: a perforated curtain, or a solution of the Vision+ type, keeps the light and part of the view.
Total darkness is not the goal.
Wind, as a design criterion
The Loup and Var valleys channel the air, and the ridges at Saint-Jeannet and Gattières take it head-on. What comes back to us as after-sales work is curtains that have come out of their rails and slats marked by beating against the guides. The answer is mechanical: rails deep enough, slats locked to each other, fixings chosen for the substrate, and extra care on the wide openings that offer the wind the most to push against. A properly guided shutter does not rattle. A few kilometres further down, it is the salt that governs the choice of fittings, as we explain for a shutter facing the sea.
When the box cannot go into the wall
In a bastide with thick walls, opening the masonry to house a box is rarely possible and even more rarely desirable.
The renovation unit, and its real difficulty
The principle is well known: box face-fixed under the lintel or inside the reveal, rails fixed to what is there, no structural work. We have described the three ways of renovating a roller shutter without masonry elsewhere. What is less well known is the fitting work on a stone wall. The surface is never flat, the plumb varies between the top and the bottom of the reveal, and a rail fitted without packing leaves a visible gap that jumps out at you from the terrace. We would rather know before manufacture: a dimension taken at the top, the middle and the bottom saves discovering the problem once the unit is on site.
| Situation | Suitable solution | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| New build, structure still open | Tunnel box built into the masonry | The opening left for it and the roll diameter, planned in advance |
| Complete replacement of the joinery | Monobloc married to the window | The daylight opening to be preserved |
| Stone wall, façade kept as it is | Face-fixed renovation box | Irregular plumb, keeping the box discreet |
| Existing wide sliding opening | Renovation unit, reinforced aluminium curtain | Curtain weight and motor torque |
Colour, the owners’ first objection
Many people tell us straight away that they do not want “a white box above the window”. The point is a fair one.
Against lime render, a cold white cuts through and draws the eye far more than the bulk of the box itself. Sands, beiges, light greys, earth tones and olive greens sit better in a Provençal façade, and a wood effect recovers the spirit of old joinery. A chamfered box, a narrow rail, a matched colour or a frankly contrasting one: those decisions are taken in front of the façade, in daylight, not from a colour chart on a kitchen table. The configurations are set out on our made-to-measure roller shutters page.
Manufacturing a few kilometres from the job
Our workshop is at La Gaude, the next commune along: Vence and Saint-Jeannet are immediately within reach, Cagnes-sur-Mer and the coast just below. For a roller shutter in Vence, Saint-Jeannet or Tourrettes-sur-Loup, that short distance has very concrete effects.
A dimension is taken to the millimetre and goes into production as it is, with no rounding up to the next catalogue size. A particular colour is handled as an ordinary order. A wide curtain does not cross the country on a lorry, with the transhipment and the marked boxes that go with it. And if a dimension has to be revised once the old shutter is off, the part comes back to the workshop instead of waiting its turn in a distant factory. It is also what lets us deal with a jammed shutter before tenants arrive, which happens more often in this area than you would think.
We manufacture; an approved installer fits. The joiners and blind specialists of the area work with the workshop direct.
The shutter never works alone
On a south-facing terrace, the shade outside counts as much as the shutter on the living room: a bioclimatic louvred pergola makes the space usable in the middle of the day, where an awning is enough on a more modest façade. Both appear in our catalogue without coming off our own machines, unlike the shutters. Then there are the summer nights, windows open, with everything the hinterland has in the way of insects. Made-to-measure insect screens — roller, vertical, side-opening or motorised — are often what owners wish they had ordered at the same time as their shutters.
What owners in the valley ask us
How wide can you go on a sliding opening?
It depends on the material, the slat height, the box and the motor chosen. On a very wide opening, two separate curtains sometimes give a better result than one. We confirm feasibility on the dimensions as surveyed, never on an estimate given over the phone.
Can a shutter be motorised without bringing power to it?
Yes. A solar motor for complete independence, radio control to operate a mains motor without drilling the walls.
Will a stone wall take the fitting?
In the great majority of cases yes, with fixings chosen for the substrate and packing where the stone is not flat. The real thing to check is the condition of the lintel and the room available under it.
Do you go beyond Vence?
Yes, across the whole department, with a particular familiarity with the belt of hills from Gattières to Roquefort-les-Pins, and with Saint-Jeannet, Tourrettes-sur-Loup, La Colle-sur-Loup and Le Rouret. For a house on its own at the end of a track, tell us: it changes how the delivery is organised.
Let’s talk about your openings
If you take one thing from this, take this: have your openings surveyed before you compare quotations. The real dimensions, the aspect, what the wall is made of and where the consumer unit sits all change the configuration, and therefore the comparison. Send us your project through the made-to-measure quotation page and describe your situation: we reply with a configuration and the reasoning behind it and, if you would like, the name of an approved installer near you.
For Vence and the Loup valley, our page on roller shutters in Vence covers the local constraints.
