Blinds in Brooklyn

Brooklyn sits among the top price-per-square-metre suburbs in Pretoria, and the housing stock reflects that range: gracious older homes on generous stands sitting a few streets from newer, tightly designed boutique developments near the shops and embassies. Without the ridge's steep terracing, the specification questions here are less about reach and geometry and more about matching product to a house's age and finish.

Heritage stands tend to want a treatment that respects original window proportions — timber venetians usually suit better than a hard aluminium finish. Newer, more compact developments lean toward clean rollers and motorised systems that suit smaller, more efficiently glazed openings.

Flat ground, but two very different generations of window to specify for.

Most requested here

• Sunscreen & blockout rollers — the standard fit for newer apartments and boutique developments.
• Cellular / honeycomb blinds — insulation value on older, single-glazed heritage windows.
• External venetians — for the renovations opening a heritage stand's back wall up to the garden.

What the sun does on flatter ground

Losing the ridge does not lose you the sun. Pretoria sits at roughly 25.75 degrees south and about 1,300 m up, and the two numbers that matter are the same on Brooklyn’s level streets as they are on the crest: near 88 degrees at midday in December, and about 41 degrees due north at midday in June. The high summer sun is the manageable one, because a veranda, a stoep roof or an eave intercepts most of it before it reaches the pane. The low winter sun is the awkward one — it comes in underneath the same overhang and reaches metres across a floor, which is why so many older homes here are bright and cold at the same time in July.

That splits the brief neatly between the two generations of house. On an established stand with deep verandas, the north rooms are largely shaded already, so the interior blind is dealing with glare and ultraviolet rather than heat: a sunscreen mesh in the 3 to 5 per cent range holds the street and the garden while cutting the worst of it. Single-glazed rooms on the shaded side are a different complaint entirely, and a cellular blind, trapping air in its cells against the glass, does more for a cold room than any flat fabric will. In the newer boutique developments the glazing is smaller and better sealed, the openings are more standardised, and clean rollers or a motorised run across a balcony slider usually finish the job.

Two limits worth saying out loud. Sunscreen mesh gives daytime privacy only; once the lamps are on after dark it works in reverse, which matters on a street where houses sit close together. And in a sectional-title development anything fixed to the outside — an awning, an exterior blind, a screen on a balcony — needs the body corporate to agree before it is ordered. We will help you put that request together, but we will not treat the approval as a foregone conclusion.

Ultraviolet at this altitude fades a rug and a timber floor all year, not just in summer.