The Wilds Light & Glass Field Guide

Take this guide with you as a PDF — 17 pages, 1.1 MB, everything on this page.

01 — The case

Why a shading brief written for Pretoria East won’t do here

Two hundred and twenty hectares. Two main gates, and then six more — Elephant Hills, Leopard’s Den, Rhino Ridge, Buffalo Creek, Cheetah’s View, Lion’s Head — each with its own boom and its own guard.^[1][2] Inside them, 531 freestanding houses and 57 sectional-title schemes, sitting between Woodhill Golf Estate and Mooikloof with the R21 and the N1 a few minutes off.^[1][2] None of which is what matters for shading. What matters is the age.

Almost all of this went up after 2000. That means big, confident, contemporary building: double-storey, four and five bedrooms, four hundred and fifty square metres and upward, living areas that fold open onto a braai patio through sliding walls three and four metres wide.^[2] Lovely houses. Also, per square metre of floor, considerably more glass than the older suburbs down the road carry — and glass is where a home gains and loses most of its heat.

The gardens have not caught up. A tree planted in 2011 is not the tree shading an old Waterkloof stoep. Across most of The Wilds, and through Lion’s Head above all, the canopy is young and thin, and a four o’clock sun in January reaches the living-room slider with nothing standing in the way. Older suburbs solved half of this by accident, forty years ago, with a spade. Here the shade has to be fitted rather than grown.

And there is no house orientation. A golf estate lines its stands along a fairway and you can guess. This one cannot be guessed: six sub-estates, curving internal roads, culs-de-sac pointing at every bearing on the compass. Your neighbour’s answer is quite likely the wrong answer for you. Everything below is true of the estate. Only a compass held flat against your own wall makes it true of your house — which is why the last section of this guide is about the visit rather than the theory.

An external aluminium venetian blind mounted outside a west-facing window of a contemporary rendered double-storey home in The Wilds, wide slats in slim side guide rails tilted against a low late-afternoon sun, a small paved patio and young estate garden trees below, and the folded Bronberg hills soft in the background — **Heat turned back at the wall.** Aluminium slats running in side guides, hung outside the pane and tilted down against the four o’clock sun. Nothing has to be absorbed and re-radiated inward — and you keep the ridgeline through the gaps.

02 — The numbers

The Wilds’ sky, in measured degrees

Start with the finding that decides most of what follows. The most-cited South African study of sun, shade and daylight in town planning — worked out for Pretoria at 25.733° south — states plainly that western afternoons run significantly hotter than eastern mornings, that horizontal overhangs suit the high, altitude-dominated sun on a north facade, and that low, azimuth-dominated east and west sun needs vertical control instead.^[4] The Wilds sits in Garsfontein at roughly 25.79° south.^[3] A few hundredths of a degree adrift. Those are, for every practical purpose, our angles.

Then the geometry. Solar noon on 21 December puts the sun at 87.7° — all but vertically above the roof. Six months on, at noon on 20 June, it manages 40.84°.^[4] Forty-seven degrees of travel between one solstice and the other. That single number is why one blind so seldom answers a whole room for a whole year.

If you live on a patio, though, the sunsets matter more than the noons. On 21 December the sun drops at an azimuth of 243.35°, twenty-seven degrees south of due west. On 20 June it sets at 295.76°, twenty-six degrees north of it.^[4] Fifty-two degrees of drift along your western horizon between summer and winter. A concrete eave, poured once, is aimed at exactly one point in that arc and is wrong about all the rest.

Which reduces to something you can hold in your head: on north glass an overhang genuinely earns its keep. Against four o’clock on a west wall it does close to nothing, and no amount of extra projection will change that.

The December and June arcs, drawn to the published Pretoria altitudes and sunset bearings at 25.733° S^[4]. This estate lies a few hundredths of a degree off that line.

Three Highveld facts that change the answer

Thin air, harder light. Pretoria stands at roughly 1,339 m above sea level, and the Bronberg foothills that Pretoria East climbs are level with that or a shade above.^[5] Ultraviolet climbs about 12% for every 1,000 m of altitude, simply because there is less atmosphere overhead to absorb it.^[6] The consequence is dull and expensive: a west-facing fabric is worked harder here than the same fabric at the coast. On the sun side we choose fabric on its performance figures and let colour come second.
The storms arrive in the afternoon, and this is the hail belt. Pretoria’s rain is almost entirely summer rain, delivered in short, violent, electrical storms that build over the Highveld through the afternoon and are gone by supper.^[7][8] Satellite study of South African convective storms places hail along the Highveld, most frequent from mid-November through February, peaking in the afternoon.^[9] Set that against an awning’s normal working day and the problem states itself.
Then the year turns over. Highveld winters are dry, cloudless and properly cold once the sun is down, frost on the lawn and no rain to speak of.^[8] On a north or south window the brief inverts: you are no longer keeping heat out, you are trying to stop it walking back through the glass at nine at night. Insulating value starts to matter as much as shading value.

03 — Wall by wall

Four walls, four completely different arguments

The same house, four unrelated problems. Before anyone discusses fabric or motors, establish which wall the room sits against. In this estate that one fact narrows the choice further than the budget does.

North — the wall you shade in January and open in July

The sun spends the entire winter over here. In December it is high enough that a decent eave carries much of the load; by June it has dropped to forty degrees and arrives level with your eyes.^[4] That June sun is free heating, landing in the rooms you actually sit in. Drop a plain blockout all day to solve the January glare and you have thrown away the single best thing a north wall gives you.

Verdict: angle it — never simply cover it.

West — where the room is actually lost

From three o’clock the sun comes in almost horizontally, from wherever in that fifty-two-degree spread the month happens to put it,^[4] and in The Wilds this is usually the same wall as the braai patio and the garden view. If the lounge is intolerable by four, the pane itself has warmed through and is radiating at you — so an interior blind kills the glare instantly and the heat only in part, because by then the heat is already on your side of the glass.

Verdict: intercept it outside the pane if you can; a serious sunscreen if you can’t.

East — a small problem with two opposite answers

The same low geometry, mirrored, arriving into a house that has been shedding heat all night — so this is a light problem rather than a heat problem. In December it clears the horizon early, and in a sectional-title cluster it can come off a neighbour’s roof straight through a bedroom window. Two rooms on one east wall routinely want opposite things: blackout darkness where somebody sleeps, and a clear view of the garden where somebody drinks coffee.

Verdict: specify per room, not per wall.

South — the quiet wall, until winter

Barely any direct sun for most of the year, which makes south rooms the steadiest-lit in the house and the reason studios and studies get put here. The bill arrives after dark: on a clear, frosty Highveld night the south glass is the first surface in the house to go cold.^[8] Nothing on this wall needs shading. Something on it needs insulating.

Verdict: the question is heat loss, not glare.

A single smooth flat blockout roller blind, one seamless opaque sheet on a tube with no folds or slats, lowered nearly fully over an east-facing bedroom window in a new-build home in The Wilds at a low sunrise, with a manicured garden and estate wall visible beneath the thin line of light where the blind stops short — **Genuinely dark, at half past five in December.** One unbroken sheet of blockout on a tube — no folds, no ladder tapes, nothing for Highveld dust to gather in. Against a low sunrise over an east-facing garden, nothing else we make gets this close to real darkness.

Optional

Would you rather have this read against your own house?

Name the rooms giving you grief. We’ll send this same guide back with your elevations pencilled in against it — the order we’d work through the windows, and the argument we’d be having with ourselves on each one.

That is all it is: an email. No visit gets booked and nobody rings you.

Your name

Suburb or sub-estate

Roughly how many windows?

Which rooms or elevations are the problem?

POPIA: we use what you type here for two things only — sending you this guide, and booking the free measure if you ask for one. It is never shared and never sold.

JavaScript is not running here. The form higher up the page needs it; this one does not, and it reaches us just the same.

04 — The shortlist

Everything we’d fit here, with the bill attached

Every one of these is the right call in some room of an estate house and a mistake in another. The grey box under each is the part a brochure never prints. Anything you tap “Add to my list” on lands in the worksheet and the measure form further down, already filled in.

Sunscreen roller blinds

Living glass facing the patio or garden

A single flat sheet of open-weave fabric on a slim tube. Nothing folds, nothing gathers, nothing stacks. It takes out the glare and a worthwhile slice of the solar gain with it, and you can still see the lawn, the braai and whoever is standing at it — which is the entire reason that window is that size. A lined curtain would solve four o’clock by deleting the view you bought the house for.

The trade-off

After dark it works in reverse: lights on inside, and it is you who is on display. Where a neighbour’s window sits close — sectional title especially — we’d hang a blockout on the same bracket and run the two together.

Blockout roller blinds

Bedrooms · the east side of the house

One smooth sheet, no ladder tapes, no folds for Highveld dust to settle into, and a genuine thermal layer against the glass on a July night. Set against a low December sunrise over an east-facing garden, nothing else we make gets this close to actual darkness.

The trade-off

It is a switch rather than a dial — down is dark, up is everything, nothing in between. That makes it the wrong instrument on a north living room where the June sun is the whole point. And without side channels, light will always find the edge of the reveal.

Day-night blinds

The open-plan middle of the house

Sheer and solid bands on one sheet, sliding past each other, so the same blind runs from clear garden view to privacy and near-dark like a dimmer on a light. In an open-plan Wilds living space, where the light changes character three or four times between breakfast and the braai, that range is the whole argument.

The trade-off

The sheer bands reverse after dark the way any sheer fabric does. And it is a light-control product first, a heat product second: on a genuinely hot west wall it is doing lighter work than anything mounted outside the glass.

Timber & aluminium venetian blinds

North rooms · sculleries · bathrooms

North is a job for angle, not coverage. A venetian bounces a high December sun off the ceiling and lies flat open in June, so one product covers both ends of that forty-seven-degree swing where a roller has to pick a side.^[4] Timber reads warm in a living room; aluminium ignores steam, which is what you want in the scullery, the guest bathroom and the laundry.

The trade-off

Slats hold dust, and there are a great many of them — cleaning a large north wall of timber is a real afternoon, where aluminium is a wipe. And timber has no business in a room that steams.

Cellular / honeycomb blinds

Nurseries · south rooms · above the garage

The fabric is folded into cells that trap still air against the pane — the best-insulating and by some way the quietest fabric blind we make. In a nursery, a study, or a south room that goes cold the moment the sun drops on a clear winter night,^[8] it is the cheapest thermal improvement a window can be given short of reglazing it. Cordless as standard, which matters where there are small children.

The trade-off

Everything it gives you is banked on the cold side of the year. Ask it to reject heat on a hard west wall and it will disappoint you, and as soft pleated fabric it has no business in a dusty scullery.

External venetian blinds

Hard west & north-west glazing

Aluminium slats in side guides, hung outside the glass. On a hard west wall we’d choose these over an interior blockout for a reason that is simply physics: turn the energy away before it touches the pane and the room stays cooler than if the pane absorbs it and radiates at you until nine at night. Tilted rather than closed, they keep the view.

The trade-off

This is the expensive end of the list, it changes the look of the facade, and it lives outdoors through a hail season running mid-November into February.^[9] We’d motorise it with a wind sensor as standard — and since the committee will want to see it, settle the colour early.

Roller shutters (shading)

West walls · exposed elevations

Rigid aluminium slats that roll down out of a headbox on the outside of the building and cover the opening completely — glare and heat stopped before the glass, and real insulation once they are shut. To be clear: shading, not security. Security-rated shutters are a separate product, built and certified to a different standard, and quoted separately.

The trade-off

This is the most visible change on the whole list, and the headbox has to sit somewhere — that is a design decision, not a measurement. Shut is also shut: full coverage, with no adjustable middle ground.

Folding-arm awnings

The braai patio

In The Wilds the patio is not an extra. It is a room the plans forgot to enclose. An awning adds more usable house than anything you could do to a window, and then folds itself away in May to hand the low winter sun back to the paving.

The trade-off

It spends its life outdoors, and Highveld hail peaks in precisely the hours the awning would be out.^[9] We’d specify a full cassette and a wind sensor that pulls it in whether you are at home or halfway to Sandton — not an upsell, just the responsible way to fit one.

Concealed & recessed blind boxes

New builds · double-volume windows

The fabric comes out of a narrow slot in the ceiling or the bulkhead, with the tube and every bracket out of sight. Raised, the window is glass and frame and nothing else. In a sub-estate still building out — Lion’s Head above all — this is the product that pays most for good timing: specified while the bulkhead is still stud and board, it reads as drawn in rather than added on.

The trade-off

It can be retrofitted into a finished ceiling, but rarely invisibly, which is why we ask to be involved early. Where the ceiling is already closed, a cassette pelmet colour-matched to the wall gets most of the way there.

Motorised blinds & automation

Wide stacking doors · anything exterior

On a four- or five-metre stacking door this stops being a luxury and becomes a question of reach: a blind that wide is heavy, and a blind that needs a pole is a blind nobody touches after March. Anything mounted outside wants a wind sensor so it can save itself when a Highveld storm arrives.^[9] And one app will run the whole ground floor before you have got out of the car.

The trade-off

It needs power at the head of the opening — hard-wired, battery or solar. Mid-build the cable disappears into an open wall for almost nothing; in a finished house a rechargeable motor avoids chasing the plaster but wants charging two or three times a year.

The worksheet further down carries the rest of what this estate’s openings ask for: vertical & panel blinds for the wide stacking doors onto the garden, skylight & shaped blinds for double-volume gable glass and the stair-void windows nobody can reach, motorised curtain tracks where heavy lined curtains are already hanging, zip screens to shut the braai patio against wind, dust and the first mosquitoes of the evening, and blind repairs — re-cording, new chains, tilt mechanisms, motor call-outs — regardless of who fitted the thing in the first place.

A folding-arm awning fully extended on its articulated arms with no support posts over a paved braai patio beside the glazed rear wall of a double-storey home in The Wilds, an outdoor dining table beneath it, clipped hedges and a manicured lawn, and a dark Highveld thunderstorm building on the horizon in the late afternoon — **The hour it all gets decided.** Projection, drop, fixing height and how exposed the paving really is are settled standing on it. With the hail season running mid-November into February,^[9] the wind sensor is part of the specification rather than a line you can decline.

05 — Permission

Which of these needs somebody else’s approval

There is a clean line running through the list above, and it is drawn at the glass. Anything fitted inside an existing reveal — a roller, a venetian, a cellular, a day-night — changes nothing visible from the internal road or a neighbour’s stand, so it is nobody’s business but yours. Anything that reads on the outside of the building is a different conversation: awnings, external venetians, roller shutters and zip-screen side channels all show from the street, and estates in this part of Pretoria East generally want them approved and held to a neutral, agreed palette. The Wilds runs double access control at the main gate and six separately-manned sub-estate gates,^[1] which tells you roughly how seriously it takes the order and the look of the place.

None of which is an argument for avoiding the exterior products. It is an argument for choosing their colour before you choose anything else. We specify exterior work in powder-coated finishes across a broad range, we’ll talk the facade match through with you before a single order goes in, and we’ll write a spec sheet for the HOA file if they want one. We fit blinds; we don’t speak for your estate. What we will do at the measure is say plainly which items touch the outside, so the right question reaches the right desk before anything is manufactured. (We could not find The Wilds’ own architectural guidelines published anywhere online, so treat the above as the regional norm and check the HOA pack for your particular sub-estate.)

Still building, or mid-renovation? Bring us in while the walls are open. A concealed recess has to exist before the ceiling closes, and motor cabling costs almost nothing in a stud wall and a small fortune in a finished one. Worth raising with your architect too: SANS 10400-XA:2021 lifted the fenestration-calculation threshold from 15% to 20% of floor area and stopped distinguishing between the solar-heat-gain requirements of west-, north- and east-facing glass,^[10][11] so ask how your shading is being counted against all that estate glazing.

Close view of a cellular honeycomb blind half raised at a window in a home in The Wilds, its concertina of hexagonal air cells clearly visible edge-on between two fabric faces, with a frosted winter garden and estate wall softly out of focus beyond the glass — **What it does after dark.** Cells of still air, held flat against a cold pane. On a frosty Pretoria East morning this is the least expensive thermal upgrade a window can be handed.

06 — Where a website runs out

Five things this page cannot know about your house

Everything above holds for the estate. None of it has met your house. Five measurements decide the real specification, and all five are an hour’s work with a tape, a compass and a torch.

What each wall is actually pointing at

On roads that curve the way these do, “roughly west” is not a specification — not when the sunsets are themselves spread over fifty-two degrees.^[4] Twenty degrees of rotation is the difference between an interior sunscreen doing the job and needing something mounted outside the pane, so we take a compass reading at every elevation and write it down.

How deep the reveal is, and what it is made of

Depth decides whether a blind can sit inside the opening at all, and how much light escapes around the edge. Very few openings are truly square. And plastered brick, a drywall bulkhead and an aluminium glazing bar are three quite different fixings — which we would rather find out before the blind is made than on the morning it arrives.

How exposed that patio really is

An awning or a zip screen lives or dies on the wind, and here the storms build from mid-afternoon.^[7] Whether the house next door shelters your paving or funnels the gusts straight down it takes about two minutes to establish standing on the spot, and cannot be judged from a plan at all.

Where the nearest power sits

For anything motorised the entire problem is the route from a plug point to the head of the opening. In a double-volume lounge, or across a wide stacking door, that walk-around is what separates a clean installation from a visible compromise.

What is standing outside the glass

How near the neighbour’s window sits, where the internal road runs, how high the boundary wall is — each of them changes the fabric we’d put up. So does the young estate tree currently doing half your shading, and whether it will still be carrying leaves come July.

07 — How this ends

The free measure, and the shortcut

A consultant drives out to the house with fabric books and slat samples, measures every opening properly, and leaves you a written quote broken down window by window. There is no charge and nothing is committed by having it done. If a rough figure would settle things faster, the window worksheet is folded into the same form below — take either road, or neither.

A free in-home measure, and a quote priced window by window

An actual consultant at your door, mid-build or finished — never a call centre

Nothing gets manufactured until you have signed off the quote

Only researching? Tick that below and we won’t ring you

Every product you tapped on the way down this page is ticked in the boxes already.

Full name

Phone number

Email (optional)

Suburb or sub-estate

When would you like this done?

Anything else we should know?

Need a number before a visit? Open the window worksheet — two minutes.

The Wilds Blinds — window worksheet

Print it, walk the house with it, then copy the figures into the form at thewildsblinds.co.za afterwards. Width first, then drop, both in millimetres.

Give us rough sizes and a budget range comes back by the next working day. Unsure how to measure? Leave it empty. The consultant measures for free and you end up with exact per-window pricing either way. None of this is required and none of it is binding.

Room	Width (mm)	Drop (mm)	Inside or outside the reveal	Product	Remove

Nothing on the worksheet yet — and it stays optional throughout.

Whatever you type here rides along with the enquiry as plain text. No uploads, no third-party services, nothing kept anywhere else. If a photograph would help, the consultant will ask for one in the reply.

POPIA: what you enter is used for one purpose — arranging the free measure and the consultant’s call-back. Never shared, never sold. Say you’re still researching and the phone stays quiet.

Neither, thanks

Then just take the guide, annotated

A visit feels premature and a number feels beside the point? Then name the rooms and we’ll return this page with your own elevations pencilled onto it. No booking, no call.

Working out

Sources

Eleven sources sit behind this page, and every geographic, climatic and regulatory claim above comes out of one of them. Where we have reasoned onward from a source instead of quoting it, the text says so at the time.

Sunday Times Neighbourhood — The Wilds Estate, Pretoria: a 220-hectare estate bounded by Garsfontein, Allandale and De Villa Bois Marreuil, with double access control at the main gate and six separately-manned sub-estate gates (Elephant Hills, Leopard's Den, Rhino Ridge, Buffalo Creek, Cheetah's View, Lion's Head), plus a clubhouse, pool and tennis and squash courts. yourneighbourhood.co.za — The Wilds Estate
RealNet — The Wilds area profile (Pretoria): a newer family estate of 531 full-title freestanding houses and 57 sectional-title schemes (678 units), situated between Woodhill Golf Estate and Mooikloof. realnet.co.za — The Wilds
Wikipedia — Garsfontein: the Pretoria East suburb The Wilds sits in, at approximately 25.7913° S, 28.2935° E. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garsfontein
Conradie, D. (2018) "Sun, shade and natural daylight in South African town planning, with emphasis on Pretoria", Town and Regional Planning 73:47–67 — latitude 25.733°, noon solar elevation 87.7° on 21 December and 40.84° on 20 June, sunset azimuths of 243.35° and 295.76°, the finding that western-exposure afternoons run significantly hotter than mornings, and the guidance that horizontal overhangs suit altitude-dominated angles on northern facades while low azimuth-dominated sun wants vertical control. scielo.org.za — S2415-04952018000200005
Wikipedia — Pretoria: elevation roughly 1,339 m above sea level, in a transitional belt between the Highveld plateau and the lower Bushveld. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretoria
Hong Kong Observatory — ultraviolet radiation at high altitude: "For every 1000 m increase in altitude, the UV radiation level will increase about 12%." hko.gov.hk — UV radiation at high altitude
South African Weather Service — Regional Weather and Climate of South Africa: Gauteng — a summer-rainfall region whose rain falls largely in brief late-afternoon thunderstorms. journals.co.za — Regional Weather and Climate of South Africa: Gauteng
SouthAfrica.com — The Climate of Gauteng Province: summer late-afternoon thunderstorms with thunder and lightning, and dry, frosty winters. southafrica.com — Gauteng climate
Punge, H. J., Bedka, K. M., Kunz, M., Bang, S. D. & Itterly, K. F. (2023) "Characteristics of hail hazard in South Africa based on satellite detection of convective storms", Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 23:1549–1576 — hail events concentrated along the Highveld, most frequent from mid-November through February, and peaking in the afternoon. nhess.copernicus.org/articles/23/1549/2023
Roos Architects — summary of the revised SANS 10400-XA standard (2021 edition): the fenestration threshold rising from 15% to 20% of floor area, and no distinction now drawn between the solar-heat-gain requirements of glazing facing west, north or east. roosarchitects.co.za — revised SANS 10400-XA
SANS 10400-XA:2026 (Edition 3), The application of the National Building Regulations Part XA: Energy usage in buildings — the current compliance framework for building energy efficiency, which superseded the 2021 edition in March 2026. SANS 10400-XA:2026 (Edition 3) at the SABS store

Two things worth stating plainly. First: the solar figures in source 4 are calculated for Pretoria at 25.733° south, and The Wilds sits a fraction off that line, so our true angles differ by a hair — we quote the published numbers rather than invent our own. Second: the hail, frost and rainfall material is regional Highveld physics presented as such. There is no published hail or frost record for this estate on its own, and no architectural guidelines for it that we could find online either. Both are reasons we would rather stand in your particular house than study a map of it.

Whenever suits you

Enough theory. Let’s go and measure something.

A single visit, honest millimetres, a price written against each opening — and no obligation of any kind once we leave.

Book your free expert measure → Browse the full range