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Part of the same Parktown-ridge heritage belt as Westcliff — quiet streets, older homes, the Wilds close by.
Forest Town sits on the same ridge system as Westcliff, one suburb over toward Parktown, and shares the same building era for the most part: solid older homes with proper sash windows and gardens that have had decades to mature. It's a small, settled suburb rather than a high-turnover one, which usually means the windows have their original joinery intact and the treatment needs to respect that rather than fight it.
Because Forest Town backs onto green space, ground-floor rooms often get good natural filtering through the day — it's upstairs bedrooms and any newly opened-up living area with bigger glass that tend to need the most attention.
Two things about a Forest Town window change what can go on it. The first is reveal depth. Thick older masonry gives an opening with real depth, and that depth decides everything: whether a headbox tucks neatly inside the joinery or sits proud of it, whether a blockout blind leaves you a hairline of light down each side, whether a venetian headrail clears the sash catch when the window is opened. We take that measurement at four points on every opening, because century-old joinery is very rarely square and the difference between roughly 90 mm and roughly 140 mm sends the specification one way or the other.
The second is what is behind the plaster. Quartzite, brick and lath-and-timber lintel each take a bracket differently, and on the heavier exterior systems the substrate decides whether the product is viable on that wall at all. It is not a question anyone can answer from a photograph, which is why the measure is a site visit rather than a phone call.
Forest Town's streets follow the ridge contours rather than a grid, so two houses on the same road can face opposite ways and want opposite answers. What is constant is the geometry: at midsummer noon the sun stands at 86 degrees, near enough overhead for a deep veranda to shade a north window on its own, and at midwinter noon it drops to 40 degrees due north and walks straight in under that same eave, several metres across the floor. The midsummer sun then sets at 243 degrees — west-south-west — which is why a west room here is the expensive one to solve and an east room is a glare problem rather than a heat one.
A north-facing sitting room usually wants sunscreen mesh rather than blockout: it takes the sting out while the garden and the green belt behind it stay legible, and people actually use it, which they do not do with a blind that behaves like a switch. Bedrooms want blockout, and on a deep reveal the choice is honestly between inside-fit for looks and face-fit for darkness, or inside-fit with side channels if the room has to be properly dark. Bathrooms and the scullery go to aluminium venetians, because steam and lacquered timber do not get along. West-facing studies are the ones where stopping the sun outside the glass — external louvres or a shutter — earns its cost, if the elevation and the wall will take it.
Anything fixed to the outside of a facade on a structure older than sixty years is a change to part of a structure under the National Heritage Resources Act, and that means a permit application to the provincial authority rather than a fitting date. Blinds inside the reveal do not alter the structure and sit outside that. We will specify slim profiles and quiet colours and hand over the drawings and product data an application needs — what we will not do is call the approval a formality or submit it on your behalf. And an awning over a Forest Town terrace is shade, not shelter: with hail peaking here in the late afternoons of December and January, it wants a wind sensor, and it still will not stand in for a roof.
If it is the new glass that is the problem, The Westcliff Ridge Light Study goes through it properly — why a 40° June sun reaches metres into a north room, what a west elevation actually needs, and what we would specify on each. Free to read, no email asked for.
Or read The Westcliff Ridge Light Study first — free to read, nothing asked of you, and it works through the sun angles elevation by elevation.