Roller blinds

Blockout: for the rooms that must go dark

A blockout roller is a coated fabric that stops light rather than filtering it. It is what we fit in main bedrooms, nurseries and television rooms, and it is the fabric that makes the biggest difference to a Pretoria summer bedroom that faces east and gets the sun at half past five in the morning.

There is an honest limit worth knowing before you buy: a roller blind hangs a few millimetres off the glass, so a thin halo of light always finds the edges. Where you want true darkness rather than nearly-dark, we add side channels — slim aluminium tracks down each side that the fabric runs inside — and the halo disappears. It costs more. In a main bedroom it is usually worth it.

Sunscreen: for the rooms that must keep the view

Sunscreen is an open-weave mesh, typically 3–10% openness. Lower openness means more heat and glare stopped and less you can see through; higher openness means more view and more sun. On a Waterkloof Ridge living room with the city bowl in front of it, 5% is the number that comes up again and again: the glare goes, the view stays.

The mesh is doing thermal work as well as visual work. A pale sunscreen reflects heat back out through the glass before the room absorbs it; a dark sunscreen gives you a crisper view but absorbs more of that heat itself. We show you both at the measure, in the room, at the time of day that matters to you.

Where a roller earns its keep

• Bedrooms — blockout, ideally with side channels on the east and north elevations.
• Living rooms with a view — sunscreen, so the ridge outlook survives the afternoon.
• Kitchens and sculleries — wipeable blockout or a light-filtering weave; the flat sheet has nowhere for cooking grease to collect.
• Wide stack doors — either a single wide blind on a heavier tube, or several linked on one motor so they move together.
• Double-volume and stairwell glass — motorised, because nobody wants a chain hanging four metres down a stairwell.

Two fabrics, one bracket

Where a room needs both jobs done properly, a double roller puts a sunscreen and a blockout on the same bracket: mesh down by day, blockout down at night. If you would rather have one blind doing both, look at a day-night blind, which alternates sheer and solid bands in a single fabric.

Controls and child safety

A roller runs on a side chain, a spring mechanism or a motor. Every chain we fit is tensioned and anchored to the wall as standard — not on request. In nurseries, playrooms and any low window we will steer you towards a motorised or cordless control instead, so there is nothing hanging at all.