Home / The Field Guide
Free · un-gated · specific to Raslouw
Raslouw's estates are built around open-plan living and patios — a lovely way to live, and a great deal of unmanaged glass. Here is where the sun actually lands through the seasons, which rooms suffer, what we'd specify for each — and, honestly, what every one of those choices costs you in return.
01 — The starting point
Raslouw sits on the western, countryside edge of Centurion — historically a belt of agricultural holdings, plots and small farms, a good share of which still remain, which is why the suburb keeps its deliberately open, semi-rural feel.[1][2] Over the last decade much of that farmland has been rezoned and rebuilt into secure residential estates and boomed-gate complexes — homes in estates like Raslouw Lifestyle, Raslouw Glen and Raslouw Manor, on stands ranging from small townhouse plots to the surviving smallholdings.[1]
Almost every home here is brand new or mid-renovation. That single fact changes the whole shading conversation. New builds are drawn around a wall of glass: the kitchen, dining and living volume opens onto the patio and the garden through big stacking doors, and the same three or four openings carry all of the sun, all of the privacy and all of the entertaining. Get those wrong and an open-plan room heats up fast on a Highveld afternoon and stays that way.
The openings are rarely standard. Floor-to-ceiling glass, oversized sliders, stair-void windows and gable glazing are exactly the sizes an off-the-shelf blind doesn't fit — which is the whole reason made-to-measure exists, and the reason a room has to be specified on its own terms rather than covered with one blanket product.
And on Raslouw's curved estate roads, you cannot tell which way a house faces from a map. Two neighbours can face completely different directions, so a guide can tell you what the sun does over the suburb — but only a compass held against your own wall tells you what it does to your lounge. We come back to that at the end.
02 — The light here
Centurion sits at about 25.86° south, roughly 1,450 m above sea level on the Highveld.[3] The most-cited South African study of sun, shade and daylight in town planning is calculated for Pretoria at 25.733°[4] — about a tenth of a degree north of us, so its numbers are effectively Raslouw's own.
At solar noon on 21 December the sun reaches 87.7°: near enough straight overhead. On 20 June it reaches only 40.84°.[4] That 47-degree swing is why one blind rarely answers a whole room across the year.
The sunset bearings matter even more on a patio. On 21 December the sun sets at an azimuth of 243.35° — twenty-seven degrees south of due west; on 20 June at 295.76°, twenty-six degrees north of it.[4] The setting sun sweeps a fifty-two-degree arc along your western horizon through the year, so a fixed eave built for one of those positions is wrong for the other.
In the study's own terms: western afternoons run significantly hotter than mornings, horizontal overhangs suit the high, altitude-dominated sun on northern facades, and low, azimuth-dominated sun east and west wants vertical control instead.[4] Plainly — an eave earns its keep on north glass and does almost nothing against four o'clock on the west.
Sun altitudes and sunset bearings from the published Pretoria figures at 25.733° S[4] — Centurion is about a tenth of a degree further south.
03 — Room by room
One house, four different problems. Before fabric, before motors, work out which wall the room sits on — it decides more than anything else here.
Where the sun lives all winter: high enough in December that a decent eave does much of the work, then low at 40° and pouring straight in by June.[4] On a cold Highveld morning that winter sun is worth money, so a plain blockout roller down all day costs you the warmth you were entitled to.
Low, almost horizontal sun from three o'clock, landing anywhere across a 52-degree spread depending on the month[4] — and on most Raslouw homes it's also the elevation the patio and the garden view face. If the lounge is unbearable at four, the glass itself is heating and radiating inward: an interior blind fixes the glare at once and the heat only partly.
The same geometry mirrored, into a house that has cooled all night. In December the sun clears a low horizon early, and in a townhouse cluster it often clears a neighbour's roof straight onto the bedroom window — and two rooms on one wall frequently want opposite things: properly dark where you sleep, still see-through where you take your coffee.
Almost no direct sun for most of the year, so south rooms hold the steadiest light in the house — and are first to feel a cold, clear Highveld winter night.[7] Shading is rarely the issue here; heat loss through a big pane usually is.
Optional
Tell us which rooms are giving trouble and we'll email you this same Field Guide with your elevations noted against it — which windows we'd treat first, and what we'd be weighing up on each.
It's an email, not a visit. Nobody phones you about it.
04 — The specification
Each of these is right somewhere in an estate home and wrong somewhere else. The trade-off box is the part a brochure leaves out. Tap "Add to my list" and it carries into the window list and the measure form below — no retyping.
One flat sheet of open-weave fabric on a slim tube — no folds, no gathers. It cuts glare and a useful share of the solar gain while leaving the garden and patio visible, which here is the whole point of the window. Better than a lined curtain, which solves four o'clock by deleting the view you bought the house for.
It reverses after dark: lights on inside, and you become the visible one. Where a neighbour's window sits close in a complex, pair it with a blockout on the same bracket.
A single smooth sheet, no folds for Highveld dust to settle into, and a real thermal layer on a cold night. Against a low December sunrise over an east-facing garden, nothing else comes as close to genuine darkness.
Binary — down is dark, up is everything — so it's the wrong tool on a north living room where you actually want the June sun. Without side channels, light finds the edge of the reveal.
Alternating sheer and solid bands slide past each other, so one blind runs from full garden view to privacy-and-dark like a dimmer — the natural pick for a Raslouw open-plan living space where the light changes through the day.
The sheer bands still reverse for privacy after dark, and it's a lighter-duty answer than exterior shading on a genuinely hot west wall — a light-control tool first, a heat tool second.
On a north elevation the useful control is angle, not coverage: a venetian throws high December sun up onto the ceiling and opens flat in June, so one product handles both ends of that 47-degree swing a roller can't.[4] Warm timber suits a living room; crisp aluminium shrugs off steam in the scullery, guest bathroom and laundry.
Slats collect dust and take longer to clean than a flat roller — aluminium wipes down far more easily than timber, worth remembering on a big north wall. Timber doesn't belong in a steamy room.
The fabric cells hold still air against the glass — the best-insulating, quietest fabric blind we fit. In a nursery, a study, or a south room that feels the cold on a clear winter night,[7] it's the cheapest thermal improvement short of replacing the window, and cordless as standard.
The gain sits on the winter side of the ledger — it's not a heat-rejection answer for a hot west wall, and as a soft pleated product it's the wrong choice in a dusty scullery.
Aluminium slats in side guides, mounted outside the glass. We'd specify these over an interior blockout roller on a hard west wall for a physical reason: turning the heat away outside the pane keeps a room cooler than absorbing it inside, where the glass warms and radiates at you all evening. Tilted, they still keep the view.
The premium option, visible on the facade, and living outdoors in a hail belt that peaks in the late afternoon.[6] We'd motorise it with a wind sensor — and it's an item the estate will want to sign off, so plan the colour early.
Rigid aluminium slats rolling down from a headbox outside the building, covering the whole opening — heat and glare stopped before the glass, with real insulation when fully closed. Shading, not security: these are shading roller shutters, not security-rated shutters, which are a different product, built and certified differently, and quoted on request.
The most visible exterior change on this list, and the headbox has to live somewhere — a design decision, not just a measurement. Closed is closed: full coverage, not adjustable light.
Where the outdoors is the extra room — and in a Raslouw home the braai patio always is — an awning buys more usable house than anything you could do to a window, then folds away and gives back the low winter sun on the paving.
It lives out in the weather, and Highveld hail peaks between four and five in the afternoon.[6] We'd specify a full cassette and a wind sensor that retracts it whether or not you're home — the responsible spec, not an optional extra.
The fabric drops from a slim slot in the ceiling or bulkhead with every bracket hidden — when the blind is up, the window is just glass and frame. It's the product that rewards timing most: get it into the drawings while the bulkhead is still stud and board and it looks designed in.
Retrofitting into a finished ceiling is possible but rarely invisible, which is why we like to be in early. In an existing room a colour-matched cassette pelmet gets most of the way there.
On Raslouw's four- and five-metre stacking doors this is less about luxury than reach: a blind that wide is heavy by hand and gets used exactly never if you need a pole, and any exterior product wants a wind sensor to save itself in a November storm.[6] One app can run a whole ground floor at once.
It needs power at the head of the opening — battery, wired or solar. On a new build the cable goes in before the walls close; in a finished home a rechargeable battery motor avoids the chasing but needs charging a few times a year.
Also on the window list below, for the openings a new-build estate home is full of: vertical & panel blinds for wide stacking doors onto the garden, skylight & shaped blinds for gable glass and stair-void windows, and zip screens to close the patio against wind, dust and the early-evening midges without walling it in.
05 — The local constraint
Raslouw's secure estates and boomed complexes draw a clean line through this whole list. Interior blinds inside an existing reveal change nothing you can see from the road or a neighbour's stand, so the question doesn't arise — a roller, a venetian, a cellular blind is your decision alone. Anything that reads on the outside of the house does raise it: awnings, external venetians, roller shutters and zip-screen channels are all visible-from-outside, and estates here generally want them signed off in an approved, neutral palette.
That's a reason to plan those items with the committee in mind, not a reason to avoid them. A concrete example next door: Blue Valley Golf & Country Estate runs a predominantly Tuscan architectural theme and a formal building-approval process,[8][9] so an exterior product there is chosen to sit inside that palette, not fight it. We spec exterior products in powder-coated finishes across a wide colour range, talk facade-matching through with you before anything is ordered, and can supply a spec sheet if your HOA wants one on file. We fit blinds and won't speak for your estate — but at the measure we say plainly which options touch the outside, so the right question reaches the right desk before anything is made. (We could not find Raslouw's own estate-by-estate architectural guidelines published online, so treat this as the general estate norm and check your own HOA pack for the exact rule.)
Building or renovating? Get us in early. A concealed recess has to exist before the ceiling closes, and motor cabling is trivial in an open wall and awkward in a finished one. It's also worth knowing that SANS 10400-XA:2021 raised the fenestration-calculation threshold from 15% to 20% of floor area and no longer draws a distinction between the solar-heat-gain requirements of west-, north- and east-facing glass[10][11] — so ask your architect how your shading is being counted on those big estate windows.
06 — The honest limit of a guide
Everything above is what we know about Raslouw. What no page can know is your house — and five things decide the actual specification, all settled in about an hour with a tape, a compass and a torch.
On the estate's curved roads "west-ish" isn't good enough when the sunsets are themselves spread across fifty-two degrees.[4] Twenty degrees of wall rotation moves the answer between an interior sunscreen and something outside the glass, so we take a compass reading at every elevation.
Depth decides whether a blind can sit inside the opening at all, and how much light creeps round the edge. Openings are rarely perfectly square — and plastered brick, a drywall bulkhead and an aluminium glazing bar are three different fixings.
An awning or a zip screen lives or dies on how exposed the patio is once the summer storms build from mid-afternoon.[7] Whether the neighbouring house breaks the wind or funnels it is obvious in two minutes on the paving and impossible to judge from a plan.
For anything motorised the whole constraint is the route from a power point to the head of the window. On a double-volume lounge or a wide stacking door, that walk-around is the difference between a clean install and a compromise.
How close a neighbour's window, the internal road or a boundary wall sits changes the fabric we'd choose — as does the tree doing half your shading, and whether it will still be in leaf come July.
07 — Two ways forward
A consultant comes out to the home with fabric and slat samples, measures every window properly, and leaves a written quote itemised per window. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If you'd rather have a rough number first, the window list sits inside the same form — no obligation either way.
Our consultant does five to six measures a week across Raslouw and the estates around it, so the diary fills early — worth booking ahead if you need a particular day.
Anything you added to your list while reading is already ticked below.
Neither, for now
Not ready for a visit or a number? Tell us which rooms are the problem and we'll email you this Field Guide with your own elevations noted against it. Nothing is booked and nobody phones.
Working out
Every geography, climate and regulation claim above traces to one of these. Where we've reasoned from them rather than quoted, we've said so in the text.
Two honest caveats. The solar figures in source 4 are calculated for Pretoria at 25.733° south; Centurion sits about a tenth of a degree further south, so its own angles differ by a fraction — we quote the published numbers rather than invent our own. And the hail, frost, rainfall and UV material is regional Highveld physics, not a Raslouw measurement: there is no published frost or hail record for this suburb specifically, and we could not find Raslouw's own estate architectural guidelines online — which is one more reason we look at your particular home in person rather than at a map.
Ready when you are
One visit, real measurements, a written quote per window — and no obligation to go ahead.