Service area
Newer family estate with generous spec glazing.
We measure, make and install throughout The Wilds: the full product range, specified for the way homes here are actually built and lit.
Read The Silver Lakes Window Field Guide — the Highveld sun elevation by elevation, which blind suits which wall, and the honest trade-offs, before you book.
We fit the same product range in Woodhill Golf Estate, Six Fountains, Boardwalk Meander and Mooikloof.
The Wilds is generously glazed and comparatively young, and those two facts together decide most of what we specify here. In the older, more established pockets nearby, a mature canopy takes some of the late afternoon load off a west wall before it ever reaches the glass. In the newer, less-treed streets that help is simply not there yet, so the sun arrives on the pane at full strength and exterior shading earns its place a good deal sooner than it would on an equivalent house under thirty-year-old trees.
The sun itself behaves the same way it does across this part of Pretoria. Nearly 88 degrees at noon in December, which any modest overhang handles; about 41 degrees at noon in June, low and in the north, which is warmth worth keeping. The problem hour is the long, flat run of western sun through the afternoon, and no overhang stops a horizontal ray. Add the Highveld altitude, which pushes ultraviolet up roughly ten percent for every thousand metres, and fade along a sunny wall becomes a real consideration rather than a theoretical one.
Generous spec glazing usually means fewer, larger openings rather than many small ones. That suits a roller blind, which is a single flat drop with nothing to bunch or fold, but it also means each blind is doing more work and each one is more visible when it is wrong. Past a certain measured width a single drop stops being sensible and the opening is either split or run as a linked pair on one motor, so the whole span moves together. Which of those it is depends on the actual measurement, so it is settled on site.
Living areas facing the afternoon: a sunscreen mesh in a 3–5% openness as the baseline, with external shading outside the glass where the room is used hard and the heat is the complaint rather than the glare. Bedrooms on the east: blockout, because a low summer sunrise decides when the house wakes up otherwise. North-facing studies and desks: something adjustable, so the winter sun is not thrown away along with the glare.
Outdoors, a folding-arm awning over the patio is the usual request, and on a newer stand with less shelter around it the wind sensor is not an upsell. Between October and March the afternoons build into storms, and an awning that pulls itself in before the weather arrives lasts a great deal longer than one that argues with it.
Silver Lakes Blinds