Hermanus and Whale Coast shading: the questions we get asked

Because the sun travels across the northern sky and sets in the west. On the shore that runs from Kleinmond through Vermont and Onrus to Hermanus, the water lies to the south of the house, so the sun never crosses it. Round the bay at De Kelders and Gansbaai the house looks back west across Walker Bay, and the sun spends every afternoon travelling over that water before setting into it. Same coast, same range, completely different brief. Saying the house faces the sea is not an answer here.

Mostly not, and treating it as one is the commonest mis-specification on this shore. Direct sun barely touches a south elevation between about March and September, and even in high summer it is confined to the first and last hour of the day. What floods the room is indirect light from a bright southern sky and a large sheet of moving water. The television washes out and the horizon goes hazy. A sunscreen roller at low openness cuts that diffuse brightness without deleting the water.

It will improve the glare and do comparatively little for the temperature. On that shore the beam arrives at low angle, at seated eye height where no roof overhang helps, with a second helping bounced off the water, and it lands late in the day when the room has been absorbing warmth for hours. Once sunlight is through the pane the energy is in the room; a blind behind the glass absorbs it, warms up and re-radiates inward. Stop the beam before the glass and the pane never warms at all, which is why the premium answer on this side lives outside the building.

Noticeably. Where the view is the whole reason for the room, a darker fabric tone on the room side gives cleaner view-through than a white one, because a pale weave bounces daylight back at you. The honest trade-off underneath that: a mesh that kills all the glare will also dull the view, and one that keeps the view perfect will leave some glare. No fabric does both. We bring two samples to your own window rather than argue about it on paper.

High ground does not absorb a wind; it redirects and compresses it. Kleinmond sits where the Kogelberg drops straight to the Palmiet estuary, and that gap funnels both the summer south-easter and the winter north-westerly fronts onto the town harder than the open beach nearby. A valley mouth, a saddle or a gap behind a village can be reliably windier than the coast a kilometre away. That is why exposure here is a property of the individual site, not the town, and why we read it standing on your deck.

Both are good products; on a genuinely exposed deck the difference is decisive. A zip screen's fabric edge is welded into a zipper held captive in aluminium side channels, so wind load passes into the building down the screen's whole height and the mesh stays taut. A folding-arm awning carries the same load through two elbows. Awnings do the overhead shade an upright screen cannot, so many decks run both, but once a site is truly exposed, channels beat arms, and on the worst harbour-front spans we will say plainly if any fabric is being asked too much.

Yes, with the right panel. Sunscreen mesh keeps the view and cuts glare, UV and insects, with daytime privacy as a side benefit. Clear PVC panels seal the same opening against wind and rain while staying transparent, which is the choice for a winter braai room where you still want to see the water. Blockout panels exist for an outdoor cinema wall or a hard west-sun opening. Spans over a couple of metres are motorised as standard, with a wind sensor on exposed positions. It remains a withdrawable shade, not a permanent enclosure.

At the sheltered end, wherever the run has one. Motors and controls are the costly part of an exterior system to replace, so the drive goes where salt and driven rain reach it least, and we pay attention to the cassette seal and the cable entry rather than assuming the coating will do all the work. Anything that projects gets automatic retraction, because the wind sensor pulls an awning in before the gust arrives, and it does so when nobody is home, which is when the expensive version of that event usually happens.

The town is the wrong unit. What decides how hard the air is on hardware is how far you are from breaking water, what stands between you and it, and how often the wind blows off the sea rather than across it. A front-line house at Gansbaai and a house six streets back in the same town are not on the same maintenance schedule. Powder-coated aluminium, sealed cassettes and marine-grade fasteners are standard everywhere on this coast; how much attention they then need depends on your metres from the surf.

No finish makes maintenance unnecessary on the front line. An occasional rinse with fresh water from a garden hose, and not a pressure washer, which drives salt into the seals, extends the life of exterior hardware more than any upgrade you can buy, and it matters most in the days after a hard blow. Good stainless still marks: a brown bloom on coastal fixings is cosmetic and wipes off; it is not the bracket giving up. Interior hardware is not exempt in a house that lives with its doors open, so aluminium goes in the kitchen and bathroom.

Twenty minutes inland the whole specification relaxes and the problem shifts from heat to cold. High-ceilinged old cottages with single glazing lose warmth through the glass all night, and cellular honeycomb blinds do more for one of those rooms than any amount of sun control, because the pleated cells hold still air against the pane. Materials that are wrong on the coast come back into play too: timber venetian slats we would talk you out of on a Gansbaai harbour window are entirely at home in a Stanford room.

It depends on which side of the glass the fixing goes. A blind fitted inside the reveal alters nothing and needs nobody's permission. A headbox, guide channel or cassette fixed to the outside face of a wall is an alteration, and on a building older than sixty years the National Heritage Resources Act means the provincial heritage authority must permit it first. That catches much of Stanford's village core and older cottages along the coast. Several coastal developments also run their own architectural guidelines, often stricter than anything statutory. We supply slim profiles, drawings and a written specification to make the request easy to say yes to, but we do not apply under anyone else's name.

Three things that cannot be answered from the road. Your actual exposure rather than your town's, by standing on the site and looking at what is upwind. What is behind the plaster and whether it will hold a fixing, since solid masonry, cavity brick, later stud work or a boarded parapet decide whether an external product can hang there at all. And every reveal, measured at three heights, because old openings move and new ones are not always square, and ten millimetres is the difference between an inside fit and a face fit. The consultant brings fabric and slat samples to hold against your own glass.

Yes. The written quote carries a line for every window, so a house can be done in stages if that suits, and nothing is priced over the phone because a cliffside rebuild and a village cottage do not share a single window. Once you approve the quote, the order is made to those figures and installed by hand, and the operation is demonstrated before the team leaves. Lead times are confirmed in the written quote rather than guessed beforehand.