Roller blinds

Everything hangs on the cloth

The mechanism barely changes whatever you spend on it. A tube, a bracket at either end, a control down one side. What changes the room is the fabric wound around that tube, and there are three families of it worth knowing about before a consultant arrives with a sample case.

• Blockout — coated on the back, so it stops light instead of softening it.
• Dim-out and light-filtering — a warm glow comes through, no view passes either way. Guest bathrooms, landings, dressing rooms.
• Sunscreen — an open mesh you can see straight through. Takes the glare, keeps the vine rows.

The half-past-five problem

The estate sits between the Klein Drakenstein and the Simonsberg, and a main bedroom on the eastern face of a house here catches the sun properly early — before half past five at the peak of a Boland summer. Blockout is the answer to that, and it works by its coating rather than its thickness, which is why a good one hangs light and rolls tight.

Now the limit, which we would rather you heard from us than discovered on the first hot morning. A roller has to hang a few millimetres clear of the glass so the fabric can travel, and light finds that gap: a thin bright outline down each side of the blind. Nearly dark. Not dark.

Where dark has to mean dark, we run the fabric inside slim aluminium channels fixed down each reveal, and the outline goes. It costs more and it adds time to the installation. In a main bedroom, a nursery or a media room it is the upgrade people are gladdest they took.

Reading the openness number

Sunscreen is a woven mesh, and the figure on the sample tag — its openness factor — is simply how much of the weave is hole rather than yarn. That one number settles both what you keep and what you give up.

• 1–3% — the most heat and glare stopped, and the view goes soft and grey with it. Sensible on a west wall you rarely look through.
• 5% — what we specify most often on this estate. The four o’clock glare lifts off the room while the vine rows and the mountain line stay perfectly legible.
• 10% and up — an airy screen that leaves the outlook almost untouched and does only modest thermal work. Usually the wrong tool when heat is the real complaint.

Colour pulls the opposite way to most people’s instinct. A pale mesh bounces heat back out through the glass but washes the view pale along with it; a charcoal mesh gives an almost photographic outlook and absorbs more of that heat itself. We hold both against your own window at the hour that bothers you, and the decision tends to make itself in about ten seconds.

Wide glass, and where one blind stops being sensible

The stack doors that open a living room onto the stoep are often three to four metres of glass in a single run. A roller will cover that, but the tube has to be sized for the span. Put too slim a tube across too wide an opening and the middle sags a fraction, the fabric starts tracking to one side, and the whole thing looks tired inside a season.

Two honest ways round it. Either a heavier tube with the fabric matched to the width, or the run split into two or three blinds sitting shoulder to shoulder under one head and linked to move together on a single motor. Past roughly three metres the split is usually the better blind, and we will say so at the measure rather than quietly sell you the wider one.

Where they end up going in

• Main bedrooms and nurseries — blockout, with side channels on the east and north elevations.
• Living rooms and tasting decks — 5% mesh, so the middle distance survives January.
• Sculleries, laundries and wine-fridge rooms — a wipeable flat sheet with no pleat for steam or cooking grease to settle into.
• Stairwells and double-volume glass — motorised, unless somebody in the house genuinely enjoys a four-metre chain.
• Studies looking onto the polo fields — mesh, because screen glare and view glare are different problems and only one of them wants a blockout.

Two fabrics on one bracket

Where a room has to do both jobs properly, a double roller carries a mesh and a blockout on the same bracket: sunscreen down through the day, blockout down at night. If the thought of two blinds in one reveal does not appeal, a day-night blind reaches the same place from the other direction: one cloth woven in bands, sheer against solid, the two layers stepping over one another as the tube turns.

Chains, springs and small hands

Three controls, and only three. A side chain, a spring mechanism you pull and release, or a tube motor. Every chain we hang is tensioned and screwed back to the wall as standard — not on request, not as a line item. In a nursery, a playroom or at any window a child can reach, we will steer you towards a motor or a cordless spring instead, so there is nothing hanging there at all.

Living with one

A roller asks very little of you afterwards. A damp cloth down the face two or three times a year, a soft brush across a mesh, and that is the maintenance. What ages a blind in this valley is ultraviolet: a west-facing fabric works considerably harder than the same cloth on a south wall and will show it first. That is the argument for specifying a fabric rated for the elevation rather than the cheapest roll in the book — and we quote the fabric manufacturer’s own written warranty rather than inventing a number of our own.