Camps Bay shading questions: glare, salt and the south-easter

Because of where the sun is when it reaches each wall. At the December solstice the noon sun stands roughly 79 degrees above Camps Bay, so a north window is easy to shade with the eave already above it. In June it drops to about 33 degrees and pushes deep into north rooms, which is usually warmth you want. The west is different: through summer the late sun comes in low and level, under any eave, straight onto the glass, and then a second helping arrives as glare reflected up off the sea. The job there is rarely to make the room dark; it is to kill the glare and the heat while keeping the view the window exists for.

It reverses. By day a sunscreen mesh cuts glare and UV and keeps the ocean and the Apostles visible as a soft silhouette, but once your lights are on and the sea is black, people outside can see in more than you would like. That is exactly why the double day and night roller exists: a sunscreen and a blockout on one bracket, sheer for the view in daylight and blockout down at night, without two separate blinds fighting over the same window. It is a slightly deeper headbox and a little more cost; if a room only ever needs one fabric, a single roller is the tidier spend.

On its own, no. A cellular honeycomb traps a layer of still air against the pane, which cuts the heat crossing the glass in both directions: it softens the afternoon load on a west window and holds warmth into a cooler south or shaded room, and it is the quiet all-rounder where a room's issue is temperature rather than glare. But it is a light-manager and an insulator, not a heat-blocker. For raw afternoon sun on a big west pane the answer is to send the heat outside the glass first, with external venetians or a roller shutter, and let the cellular do the buffering behind it.

A single blind carries to roughly three metres of fabric before a seam appears or the better answer becomes two linked blinds running on one motor. Camps Bay's newer builds run very wide, with sliding walls and frameless corners, so that threshold comes up often. At that scale a hand chain four metres down the glass ruins the exact view the architect drew, which is why motorisation is usually the practical answer on a glass wall: one button for the whole span, battery motors that retrofit without chasing cable into finished plaster, and a sun sensor that shades the west wall by itself as the afternoon turns.

We would talk you out of it. Timber and bamboo slats bring real warmth and suit studies and character rooms set back from direct spray, but they are the wrong call in a damp, salty, sea-facing room; a quality lacquer handles normal humidity, not sustained salt exposure. Powder-coated aluminium is the seaboard default, in crisp narrow slats or bolder wide ones, with wood-look finishes available, and it tilts the glare off the water at any hour. Timber is also heavier, so a very wide window wall usually needs splitting or ladder-tape support.

Because dissimilar metals corrode where they meet, and sea air accelerates it. This close to the water we specify powder-coated aluminium components and sealed exterior cassettes as the baseline rather than an upgrade, and we isolate dissimilar metals at the fixings so brackets, chains and cassettes do not eat themselves. Even then we are honest that marine-spec hardware is not fit-and-forget: an occasional fresh-water wipe-down keeps it moving, more often in Llandudno than further up the coast, and we would rather say so at the measure than pretend otherwise.

On a Camps Bay deck the wind sets the spec, not the sun, and the two do slightly different jobs. A zip screen runs its fabric in fixed side channels, its welded edge held captive so there is no gap for the south-easter to get hold of; it turns an exposed terrace into a usable outdoor room on a windy afternoon, and takes more wind than any open awning. A folding-arm awning gives softer overhead shade for the calmer days and folds away for the winter sun. The trade-off is look: a zip screen is a more fixed, framed presence on the elevation, which some facades welcome and some do not. Often both belong on the same deck.

No, and we say it plainly on every page where they appear. The roller shutters we fit are shading products: rigid aluminium slats that roll down on the outside of the glass to stop sun, heat and glare before they reach the pane, built to take the south-easter while they do it. No security rating comes with them. A security-rated product is a different thing altogether, which we can quote if you ask, and nobody should treat a shading roller shutter as a way to secure a home.

Your body corporate, and we work to that. Bantry Bay is built almost entirely as cliffside apartment blocks with wrap-around glass balconies and nothing to break the wind before it arrives, and many buildings have shared exterior finishes. Anything visible from the street, whether an external venetian, a roller shutter, a zip screen or an awning, is confirmed against the scheme's approved colours and fixings before it is quoted, and we are happy to deal directly with a managing agent, trustees or a renovation contractor if that is how the building operates. Balcony screens at height want a real wind rating and a retraction sensor.

Yes, but the measure plans for it from the start. Clifton hangs off the slope in terraces, apartments over apartments, with the beach bungalows reached only down walkways where every metre of material is carried in by hand, so a blind that arrives at the top of the steps still has to make it to the window in one piece. Nearly everything there faces due west into the sunset, so the spec that earns its keep is a sunscreen tight enough to kill low-angle glare with the horizon still visible, or an exterior layer that stops the heat before the pane. Clifton is calmer in the south-easter than Camps Bay, but the spray still carries.

With the highest salt-air specification on the range and a sensor on anything exterior, without exception. Llandudno is low-rise, mostly freestanding houses built wide into the granite boulders, and one of the most directly wind- and spray-exposed positions on the peninsula. Powder-coated aluminium and sealed cassettes are the minimum there, and we are upfront that even marine-spec hardware wants a fresh-water rinse more often than further up the coast. Finishes are matched to the natural-materials palette the village's architecture leans toward, and the single access road and limited parking mean logistics are planned with you ahead of the install date.

That is how many Fresnaye projects run. The suburb is an established hillside pocket where older houses are being extended with far more glass than they ever had, chasing the same sea and city views as the newer builds, and the work often happens in stages. We quote a first tranche with the rest planned to match later, work directly with your architect or contractor while the window schedule is still being finalised, and return for later phases. Where a renovation opens up a hillside-facing wall, motorised roller shutters or external venetians are worth planning into the build rather than retrofitting.

Five things, and on this coast they decide whether a blind still works in five years or rattles loose in one. The exact reveal depth on each opening, which decides whether a blind sits inside the frame or face-fixes above it, and matters most on frameless corners. The fixing substrate behind the plaster, concrete, brick, steel or a bulkhead, which decides the bracket and whether a heavy motorised unit can hang safely. How exposed each deck really is to the south-easter. How much salt spray your position takes. And motor power routing on concealed, double-volume and linked installations, before any ceiling or bulkhead is closed.

No. Motorisation earns its keep on the big, high and hard-to-reach glass, not on every opening. On a standard-height, easy-reach window a neat manual roller does the same job for less, and on our installs a chain always comes with a wall tensioner holding the loop taut, which is the child-safety baseline rather than an extra. Motors and sensors cost more and the power routing has to be planned, so we recommend them where the scale demands it: sliding walls, double-volume glazing, concealed head details, and any exterior awning or screen that needs a wind sensor to retract before the doctor does it for you.