All About French Shutters (or how to air-condition in France)

France has a love affair with shutters. And now that I am ‘in the know’ about these window dressings, I have gone native. I have joined my village in opening and closing these things daily. Actually, many times daily.

French shutters are not just a pretty aesthetic, unlike in some other countries where they have become redundant. Literally just window dressing. Non. Shutters in France serve a very, very effective purpose. Let’s discover this actual mainstream element of French living…

Shut up tight

If you have never been to France, typically, when you come into a French village, particularly on a hot summer afternoon, you will invariably find the town looking like it is locked up tight. All shutters will be closed. (As I sit down to write this, I have just closed my shutters.)

I have heard people comment on the deserted feeling of French villages towns, particularly in the afternoon. There is method in this madness. The shutters in France serve a real purpose. They are the very old, and very effective form of air conditioning. And the reverse in winter.

It is a point worth dwelling on. It is tempting, particularly if you come from a country where air conditioning is the default response to summer heat, to think of shutters as quaint decoration. But the traditional French shutter is actually a piece of climate-control technology. It is low-tech, passive, requires no electricity and, crucially, works from the outside of the window. That matters. Once the sun has passed through glass and heated the inside of a room, you have to get rid of that heat. A shutter stops much of the solar heat before it gets that far.

And the French have had centuries to work this out.

A very old idea

The French shutter, or volet, has a long history. Long before anybody could flick a switch and ask an air-conditioning unit to lower the temperature, people had to design houses around the weather. Windows were precious openings. They provided light and ventilation, but they also provided an opportunity for heat, cold, wind, rain and unwanted attention to enter.

Early shutters were considerably more substantial than the louvred shutters we might picture today. Wooden panels could be closed over openings to provide protection and security. In medieval and early-modern buildings, shutters were part of a home’s basic defensive and environmental envelope. They helped protect interiors from bad weather, reduced drafts and could make a house considerably darker, safer and more private at night.

As windows became larger and glass became more widely available, shutters evolved too. The solid wooden volet remained common, while louvred designs allowed something rather clever: you could shade a window without completely cutting off ventilation.

The result is the familiar French shutter that has become so strongly associated with villages, farmhouses and town houses throughout the country. And this is one of those wonderful examples of something that looks decorative to modern eyes but is actually an accumulated piece of practical knowledge.

French architecture has traditionally relied heavily on passive ways of managing the environment. Thick stone or masonry walls provide thermal mass. High ceilings can help with air circulation. Windows can be positioned to encourage cross-ventilation. Courtyards provide shade. And shutters can control exactly how much sunlight reaches the glass.

None of this requires a thermostat. Instead it requires paying attention.

When in Spain

I learned about shutters and their uses when living in Spain. Although I was in a northern village, at the foothills of the Pyrenees, the temperatures were extreme. During the summer we averaged 40 degrees C (104 F). It was a dry desert climate but still you sweated sitting still.

People ate their biggest meal at lunch time, as cooking was easiest in the mornings relative coolness in comparison. I truly understood why people siesta’d. It was too hot to do anything else in the strong heat of the afternoon. By 10pm there was a slight cooling and suddenly there was activity on the streets. Children played and people gathered at the local cafes and bars until well past midnight. The heat definitely dictated the day.

This was my first proper lesson in climate as a way of life. It wasn’t simply that people lived in hot places. Their daily routine had adapted to the movement of the sun. Morning was productive. Afternoon was protected. Evening belonged outside again.

France has historically done much the same thing, although the details vary enormously depending on where you are in the country. France is not one climate. The Mediterranean south has a very different relationship with heat from Brittany, Normandy or the north. A stone farmhouse in Provence and a Parisian apartment face different problems. But the principle is remarkably consistent. Don’t invite the heat inside in the first place.

Method in the Madness

That apartment in Spain faced east to west, with windows looking out both ends. I had interior shutters that came down over all the windows. At first I could not understand why everyone had shutters, but I was soon taught how helpful they are. They keep the coolness in and the heat out. If done properly. The same holds true in France, though maybe not such extreme temperatures (at least where I live).

The nights are for opening windows, letting in the cooler evening air. Shutters are closed for privacy, to mute noise, yet to still allow air to circulate the home. Come early morning, the shutters are opened and the sunshine is let in to air the home.

There is a rhythm to it. Open. Air. Close. Shade. Open again at night. It sounds almost ridiculously simple, but it is remarkably effective when the building, the weather and the routine cooperate.

And this is perhaps why the shutter system has survived when many other old-fashioned household technologies have disappeared. It isn’t simply tradition. It still does something useful.

Shutter shutting

Depending on how the sun tracks across your home, will depend on when you shut your windows and shutters. My house here in France faces south. The house is L shaped. The bottom part of the L (where I sleep) gets the sun in the morning and the top half of the house (my office) gets the sun in the afternoon. Whilst my Kitchen, at the point of the L, faces north.

I open all my windows in the morning to let the early morning sun and/or air in, and the duvet* gets hung out the window. In French villages you will typically see duvets hanging out windows on sunny days. In fact, most windows have a bar in place about 1/3 of the way up the window frame. Contrary to what I original thought, that it was a safety feature, I soon discovered it is there for throwing your duvet over to air it. At about 10am the duvet comes in and shutters are shut to keep the cooler fresh air in and the heat out.

It’s a Science

My office windows get the sun full on in the afternoon, so the shutters are opened in the morning as these face the shaded part of the garden the air is lovely and cool here early on. By mid-day the shutters will be closed so the room doesn’t heat up, but stays ventilated. By mid-afternoon it’s time to close the windows to stop warming air getting in and trap the inside cooler air within.

Come evening, after dark when the nights are cooling down, the windows and shutters are opened once again. And so the cycle begins again. And my goodness what a difference it makes! Well worth all the opening and closing.

The important thing is that the shutters are on the outside. An interior blind or curtain can make a room darker, but by the time it blocks the sunlight, the window itself may already have absorbed and transmitted considerable heat. An exterior shutter acts more like a shield. It intercepts the sunlight before it reaches the glass.

This is one reason traditional shutters remain surprisingly relevant in an era of rising temperatures. They are not trying to cool a hot room. They are trying to prevent the room from becoming hot. And that is a very different approach.

Heat vs Cold

But what about autumn and winter you ask? Do we still continue opening and closing shutters? Mais, oui. But, of course. Now the difference is instead of keeping the heat out we are working to keep it in. It’s the same process, but in reverse.

Windows might open in the morning for less time, as it is all about keeping heat in, but they will still be opened, especially on a sunny day, to get the fresh air in. And give the duvet its airing. Shutters may stay open and windows shut during the day when the sun is shining in. Shutters are closed at night to add insulation, or even kept closed on a particularly cold or not sunny day if needed. It is very much a seasonal device, but for all seasons – unlike air conditioning machines.

So, what about air conditioning?

This is where things get particularly interesting. Why doesn’t everybody in France simply install air conditioning? Well, some people do; mostly shops, where say foods need to be preserved, or places where people congregate, like office buildings. Increase the number of bodies and you increase heat in the room, particularly if it is a closed room. In some circumstances air conditioning makes more sense.

However, widespread domestic air conditioning is unusual in France, especially compared with some countries such as the United States. Part of this is practical. Older French buildings are designed around passive cooling, and many people had learned how to use these features. Also, much of France simply does not experience the sort of prolonged extreme heat that makes air conditioning feel indispensable. Floridians you know what I am talking about.

But there is also a cultural element. France has a long tradition of being wary of excessive drafts and abrupt changes in temperature. The idea that cold air can make you ill has deep roots in European domestic culture. Historically, the concern was not specifically about the temperature coming out of an air-conditioning vent; it was about courants d’air, or drafts, and the belief that exposing the body to moving cold air could cause illness or discomfort.

Some of this belongs firmly in the category of cultural belief rather than modern medical science. Being exposed to cold air does not, by itself, give you a cold virus. But ask a French person about sitting in a draft or having cold air blowing directly onto them, and you may well hear warnings about waking up with a torticolis, a painful crick or stiff neck, or other aches and pains. Whether or not the science supports the cause-and-effect relationship, the belief is very real. It is part of a broader French understanding of health in which the body needs to be protected from sudden changes in temperature and direct blasts of cold air. That cultural attitude has, in turn, shaped generations of French attitudes towards air conditioning.

There is also the question of what constitutes “fresh air.” In many French homes, opening the windows is associated with airing the house. Fresh outdoor air is not simply something to be filtered and mechanically circulated. Opening the windows in the morning, airing bedding, allowing the house to breathe, these are considered good for your health practices.

The French relationship with cold air

It must be said, there is an important distinction between cooling the house and making the house cold. Traditional French shutters aim for the former. Air conditioning can, depending on how it is used, produce the latter.

Walk into an aggressively air-conditioned American shop in the middle of summer and you can sometimes feel as though you have entered a refrigerator. In France, the preference has traditionally been more moderate. Shade the room, keep the heat out, ventilate when the outside air is cooler, and accept that summer should feel a little bit like summer.

Again, this is a cultural tendency rather than a rule. Plenty of French people love air conditioning, and plenty of French homes and businesses now have it. But there is still a strong preference in many households for natural ventilation where possible. And there is good environmental logic behind some of this.

Air conditioning uses electricity. It also moves heat from inside a building to the outside, warming the outside air, which can’t be good for the climate, not to mention is precisely where everyone else is trying to escape the heat. When thousands or millions of buildings do it simultaneously during a heatwave, electricity demand rises dramatically and outdoor temperatures can be affected by the waste heat expelled by cooling equipment.

Shutters, by contrast, use nothing.

The heatwave problem

Of course, there is a problem with relying entirely on old methods. The climate is changing. France has experienced increasingly severe heatwaves, and temperatures that were once considered exceptional are becoming more familiar. The traditional French house was designed to cope with the climate it historically experienced. There is a limit to what shutters, thick walls and nighttime ventilation can achieve when the nights themselves remain hot.

There is, however, a shift taking place in France as summers become hotter. People are increasingly looking for ways to cool their homes, but the solution is not necessarily traditional air conditioning. Portable fans are common, as are portable cooling units that use cold water or evaporative cooling to take the edge off the heat without turning the house into an icebox. At the same time, the French government has been encouraging the use of heat pumps and heat exchange systems as a more efficient alternative to traditional oil based heating systems. Many of these systems are reversible, meaning the same heat pump used to warm the house in winter can provide a degree of cooling in summer. It is not quite the same as the powerful, continuous air conditioning found in hotter countries, and for many French households it represents a more moderate approach: take the edge off the heat when necessary, while still relying on shutters, shade, ventilation and the natural cooling of the house whenever possible.

Air conditioning is not the only answer

But rather than simply replacing old ways with new technology, France, and Europe more broadly, is increasingly looking back at what already worked and combining it with modern building science. The result is a more thoughtful approach to keeping buildings comfortable without relying entirely on mechanical cooling. Traditional ideas such as external shutters, awnings, natural cross-ventilation and thick, thermally efficient walls are being incorporated into modern building design, alongside newer technologies such as high-performance and solar-control glass, reflective building surfaces and better insulation. Cities are also rethinking their relationship with heat, bringing back or adding in more green spaces, shaded streets and green roofs as well as walls to create cooler urban environments and reduce the heat absorbed by buildings and pavement.

In other words, the future of cooling may not be about choosing between old technology and new technology. It may be about using both. The humble shutter, the courtyard, the tree-lined street and the open window are being considered alongside smart glass, heat pumps and modern insulation. France and its European neighbours are discovering that some of the best ideas for the future may have been sitting in plain sight all along.

French Findings

If you like my little findings on France, you can read more in French Findings. Here’s a few of my topic musings below:

• Come over for an Apero
• French markets
• Horse milk
• Blood Sausage
• Breakfast in France
• Driving in France
• Exploring French Canals
• Stereotypes and Misconceptions
• Is French life better?
• Only in France
• Discovering France in a rambling walk through the country
• Learning French with Cognates

And if you like my insights, please consider joining in and nourishing my writings.

*A duvet, if you are unfamiliar with the word, is a type of bedding consisting of a soft flat bag filled with down, feathers, wool, silk or a synthetic alternative, and typically protected with a removable cover. It is the most common type of bed covering in Europe.

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