Made-to-Measure Roller Blinds

Start with the window, not the fabric book

Walk a Hyde Park house in July and the problem announces itself: the winter sun sits low and level in the northern sky, and it comes straight through the big living-room glass at eye height. In December it's nearly overhead and the same room is easy. A roller blind is our usual answer to that swing precisely because the fabric — not the mechanism — can be chosen room by room.

So the measure starts at the glass. Which way does it face? Is there jacaranda canopy outside that shades it in summer and drops bare in winter? Is the neighbour's upstairs window in the sightline? The fabric decision falls out of those answers.

The three fabrics, and the question each one answers

• "I want the glare gone but the garden kept." Sunscreen mesh. A woven fabric with a stated openness — 3%, 5% or 10% — that knocks down glare and UV while the view survives. Tighter weaves stop more heat; looser weaves show more garden. On north glass here we most often land at 5%.
• "I want the room dark." Blockout. A coated fabric that passes no light through its face, for bedrooms, nurseries and the TV room. It also earns its keep as insulation — against a January heatwave and a frosty Highveld morning alike.
• "I want privacy and soft light, and I don't need the view." Translucent. Daylight comes through diffused; the room reads bright but nobody sees in. Bathrooms, garden cottages, street-facing studies.

One honest caution on sunscreen: its privacy works in daylight only. After dark, with lamps on inside, the mesh reverses and the lit room becomes visible from the garden. In a bedroom we solve that with a double roller — sunscreen and blockout stacked on one bracket, each used at the hour it's built for.

What the measure settles that a website can't

Four things, mostly.

• Fit: inside the reveal for a flush, architectural look, or face-fixed above the opening where the plaster or tiling says so
• Span: one blind carries to roughly three metres of fabric width — past that we either split with a neat central join or link motorised blinds so the split lives in the operation, not the view
• Finish: an open tube, a fascia, or a full cassette colour-matched to your frames — decided against the actual window, in the actual light
• Control: chain with a wall-anchored child-safety tensioner as standard, spring-assist, or a quiet motor — worth specifying upfront on high glass and anything behind furniture

And where we'd steer you elsewhere

Not every window wants a roller. A very wide unbroken pane makes the join line a daily irritation — motorised linked blinds or a ceiling-recessed system handles it better. And in the panelled study of an older Dunkeld-side home, a timber venetian simply belongs in a way a coated fabric never will. We'd rather say that at the measure than fit the wrong thing beautifully.

The figure, out loud

Take a square metre of finished roller blind, hung and working: on a chain that is R1,000 at the plain end and R1,600 at the considered end, the difference being the cloth and whether one bracket is carrying two of them. Motorised, the same square metre runs R2,500 at the plain end and R3,800 at the considered end, with the tube motor, the control you pick and the commissioning all inside it.

The rate stops being sensible on very small openings, where a cloakroom window swallows a full tube, its own brackets and the same time on a ladder as a slider — those price to a minimum. Nor is any of it a quotation. That is written per window once the measure is done.