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Character homes in the parks belt, a short drive from Westcliff along the same escarpment.
Parktown North has the same bones as Westcliff — older stands, mature street trees, and a mix of original character homes with the odd contemporary rebuild slotted between them. Renovations here tend to be sympathetic to the street rather than a clean break from it, which is exactly the brief we work to on the window treatments as well.
A lot of the enquiries we get from Parktown North follow a renovation — new glazing that's brighter and better than the old windows, but with no shading plan attached. We measure the finished opening, not the plans, so the fit is right the first time.
What makes Parktown North its own job is that a single house often holds both eras. The front rooms keep their original openings — modest panes, real reveal depth, joinery that a treatment either respects or visibly fights. The back of the same house has been opened up: a wide aluminium slider onto the garden, a stacking door across what used to be a kitchen wall, sometimes a double-volume addition with glass running well above head height. The two want different products, and pretending otherwise is how a house ends up with one specification that suits neither half.
On the older front elevation, slat width matters more than people expect. A fifty-millimetre timber slat sits at about the rhythm of the existing glazing bars, so the window still reads as the window. On the new rear glass, a roller or a linked pair of rollers is usually the cleaner answer, and past roughly three metres of fabric width we either split the blind or motorise a pair rather than hang something that will not track straight.
New glass is bigger, clearer and lower-silled than what it replaced, so it lets in far more of the same afternoon. On this stretch of the escarpment the midsummer sun sets at 243 degrees, west-south-west, which puts the last two hours of light in under any overhang and straight into eyes and floors — no eave will fix it, because the light arrives from underneath. East-facing rooms get the mirror image at breakfast time, but against cool overnight masonry, so that one is a glare problem to be solved with light control rather than a heat problem to be solved with money. Ultraviolet is the quiet cost either way: at this altitude it runs high for most of the year, and it fades timber floors, rugs and joinery long before anyone complains about the temperature.
Sunscreen mesh gives you daytime privacy and takes the sting out of a west room while the mature street trees stay visible through it. After dark, with the lamps on, that reverses completely and you become the lit side — so a street-facing bedroom needs a blockout layer or curtains behind it, and we would rather say that now than have you discover it in week one. Blockout in a deep original reveal is a trade-off with no free option: inside-fit looks right and leaks a hairline at the edges, face-fit is darker and hides the joinery, side channels are darker still and add a component. Where an addition is under sixty years old the exterior question is simply a technical one; where the original structure is older, anything fixed to the outside of the facade is a heritage matter and needs its own application, and we will supply the drawings for it without calling the outcome certain.
Before the next renovation decision, The Westcliff Ridge Light Study is worth twenty minutes: the sun angles this ridge belt actually gets, elevation by elevation, and which product we would put on each — with the trade-offs stated both ways. Free, and it asks nothing of you.
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.