What we measure for out here
Mooikloof's homes tend to sit on larger stands with correspondingly larger windows — double-volume living rooms, gable and raked glazing, and long runs of glass looking out over the plot. Standard-size thinking doesn't apply; every opening is measured and specified on its own.
- Skylight & shaped-window blinds for gable glass and double-volume living areas — a category most suppliers simply don't quote on.
- Motorised blinds & automation across multi-blind walls of glass — see motorised blinds & automation.
- Cellular blinds for bedroom wings wanting real thermal comfort — see cellular / honeycomb blinds.
On larger properties we're happy to work from a floor plan ahead of the in-home measure, so the visit itself is efficient and every room's specification is agreed before we start cutting fabric.
Double-volume glass is two problems stacked
A double-volume living room is really two windows pretending to be one, and they want different things. The lower half is at eye level, does the viewing, and is reached without a ladder. The upper half exists to bring light deep into the room and is the half causing the heat, because it faces more sky and catches sun for longer either side of noon. Treating the whole wall as a single blind is the usual mistake: you end up dropping the view to fix a glare problem that lives three metres above your head.
Splitting the elevation solves it. A blind on the upper glass, on its own motor, deals with the heat and the high glare while the lower window stays clear and the outlook stays intact. It is also the only sensible arrangement operationally, since nothing above about two and a half metres will ever be adjusted by hand more than once. Where the wall is wide as well as tall, fabric width becomes the second constraint — a roller runs to roughly three metres before the tube starts to deflect — so a long span becomes linked blinds moving together off one control rather than one impossible blind.
Gables, rakes, and the point where we say no
Angled and shaped glazing is the part of a big house most suppliers decline to quote, and it is worth knowing why. A blind on a raked or sloped opening cannot simply hang; gravity is no longer holding it flat against the glass, so the fabric has to be tensioned and run in side channels to stop it sagging away and flapping. That is a more involved make and a more exacting measure, and it is why a triangular gable is quoted as its own item rather than by the square metre alone.
There are limits we will state plainly. A true triangle can be covered, but the fabric can only ever move parallel to one edge, so a perfectly symmetrical result is not always achievable and we would rather show you that at the measure than after fitting. Very steeply raked glass at height is generally motorised, because no manual mechanism survives being reached from a ladder repeatedly. And on a plot this size we are happy to work from a floor plan beforehand so the visit is efficient, but the dimensions we cut to are always the ones taken on site — a plan tells us what a room is for, never what an opening measures.
Read the Wilds Light & Glass Field Guide — what the Highveld sun does to each elevation here through the year, and what we’d fit on it, with sources.