Blinds & motorisation for Raslouw

What Raslouw homes are like

Raslouw has spent the last while turning over from smallholdings into secure clusters and freehold developments, so the housing stock is genuinely mixed — the odd remaining large plot with an older, individually built house, sitting a street or two from a brand-new gated development with a repeating floor plan. Each end of that spectrum wants a slightly different conversation about windows.

Which products suit Raslouw

On the newer cluster developments, sunscreen and blockout roller blinds are the fast, practical answer across a repeating window schedule, with motorisation worth considering on any communal or hard-to-reach opening. Where a stand still carries an older smallholding-era house, we're more often looking at aluminium venetians for kitchens and bathrooms, or a cellular blind where an original window is losing heat overnight. For anyone with a stoep or outdoor entertainment area left over from the property's smallholding days, a folding-arm awning turns that space back into somewhere you'd actually use through summer.

The window schedule of a cluster house

A new Raslouw cluster is unusually easy to plan for, and worth understanding before you enquire. The floor plans repeat, which means the openings repeat: the same lounge slider on eight houses, the same three bedroom windows, the same narrow bathroom pane high on the wall. Once one house has been measured properly the rest of the street becomes a schedule rather than a puzzle, and the sensible thing is to specify the whole house in one go instead of window by window over three years. It also means the compromises repeat. If the plan puts the main bedroom on the sunset side, it does so on every unit, and every owner in that row is having the same four o'clock conversation.

The older smallholding houses are the opposite. Nothing repeats, walls are thicker, reveals are deeper, and windows were put where the view or the breeze was rather than where a drawing said. Those are measured one at a time, and we would rather spend the extra twenty minutes at the visit than guess.

Sun, storms and what they do out here

Raslouw sits on the same stretch of highveld as the rest of Centurion, roughly fifteen hundred metres up, and altitude is what makes the light here harder than the temperature suggests. Ultraviolet climbs about ten percent for every thousand metres of elevation, so fabrics, timber floors and rugs fade fast on any window taking direct afternoon sun, whether or not the room ever feels uncomfortably hot. North-facing rooms get steady, manageable light that wants tuning rather than blocking. West-facing glass is the expensive problem from about three in the afternoon, and on a plot without mature trees — which is most of the newer developments — there is nothing outside to soften it. East bedrooms take a sharp, low sunrise that a glare filter will not fully answer.

Then there are the storms. Between October and March the afternoons build fast and the hail arrives with them. That single habit of the local weather is why any exterior product we put on a Raslouw stand is specified motorised with a wind sensor, so it takes itself in before the gust rather than waiting for somebody to be home.

Security-conscious by nature

New security estates in this belt tend to have their own aesthetic requirements for anything visible from outside. Exterior products — awnings, roller shutters, external venetians — are specified in appropriate colours and profiles, with documentation available for an owners' committee submission if your development requires one.

What we will not pretend

Sunscreen mesh gives you daytime privacy and keeps the view; after sundown with the lights on it reverses, and a cluster window three metres from the next house needs a blockout layer behind it if that matters to you. An awning shades a stoep beautifully and is not a roof — light drizzle at a pitch, nothing more. Where a development's rules do not allow anything on the outside of the facade, we say so and work inside the glass instead, which is a real compromise on a west wall rather than an equivalent solution. And on the remaining older houses, some original openings are out of square enough that a blind will show a hairline of daylight down one side. We would rather show you that at the measure than have you find it on the first morning.