A clean fabric panel on an aluminium tube, made to measure for a repeating window schedule that still needs a different answer on every elevation.
Blockout, sunscreen, or both on one bracket
A roller blind is the simplest thing on the range, which is exactly why it carries most of the work in a Southdowns home. Blockout fabric stops light completely — the standard for a nursery or a bedroom on the estate's cooler winter mornings, or a media room that needs total dark regardless of season.
The west-facing rooms are the different problem. Sunscreen fabric, usually in the 3% or 5% openness range, cuts glare and UV while keeping the garden view through the day — daytime privacy, though it reverses once the lights go on inside. For a west-facing living room that runs hot every afternoon, a double roller pairs blockout and sunscreen on one bracket, so you switch between them without touching anything else on the window.
- Blockout for total dark in bedrooms, nurseries and media rooms
- Sunscreen (3% or 5% openness) cuts glare and UV on west-facing glass while keeping the view
- Double roller combines both fabrics on a single bracket
- Cassette pelmets hide the tube in neutral, estate-appropriate finishes
- Chain control with child-safe tensioners, or fully motorised
What a roller blind costs on the estate
Something to budget against, worked by the square metre installed. A chain or spring roller in blockout, sunscreen or a light-filtering weave prices at R1,000 to R1,600 — plain blockout cheapest, a tight sunscreen on west-facing living glass or a double roller holding both fabrics dearest. Motorised, the guide is R2,500 to R3,800 with tube motor and control counted.
The repeating window schedule cuts both ways. Usefully: where the same opening recurs through the house the quote reads consistently and the fabric decision is made once. Less usefully: the little windows still cost more per square metre than the big ones, since bracket, tube and labour do not shrink with the glass, so tiny openings attract a minimum. The written quote after the free measure settles all of it.
Built for the way Southdowns windows are actually used
Southdowns' open-plan brief means a living area can run several unbroken metres of glazing onto the garden — often bordering the estate's conservation corridor. Where a run is too wide for one blind, we either split it with a central join line or motorise linked blinds so the whole wall still operates as one unit.
Because so much of that glazing repeats down the street, we default to neutral, low-visibility cassette finishes rather than anything that competes with the identical window next door. Where a window's too wide, too high or just inconvenient to reach, motorisation turns it into a one-button job — see our page on motorised blinds & automation.
Roller blinds across the wider Irene belt
The same blockout-sunscreen-or-double logic travels well beyond Southdowns itself — heritage sash windows in Irene, walled-estate glazing at Cornwall Hill, and the mixed smallholding-and-cluster stock of Raslouw and Eldoraigne all get the same free-measure, made-to-measure treatment.
See the fabrics against your own windows
A free in-home measure is the only way to get colours and openness levels right — book yours and we'll bring the samples.