Roller blinds for Simon’s Bay’s flat morning glare

The workhorse, made to measure per window

A roller blind is a single fabric panel on an aluminium tube — chain, spring or motor driven, one clean line across the glass. It’s the product we fit most across the range, because it answers the largest number of Simon’s Town windows without a fuss: naval-base view glass on a modern extension, a plain sash on a fisherman’s cottage, a wide slider onto a harbour-view deck.

Blockout or sunscreen — which one, where

• Blockout for bedrooms and nurseries: total light stop against the bay’s hard morning glare, with the side benefit of an insulating layer against a stone cottage’s summer heat and winter chill.
• Sunscreen (3–5% openness) for living rooms and kitchens with a harbour view worth keeping: cuts glare and UV while the fleet and the water stay visible through the weave. Daytime privacy reverses at night once the lights go on inside — pair it with a second blind or curtain for a street-facing bedroom.
• Double roller combines both fabrics on one bracket, for a room that wants full blockout at night and a filtered daytime view without two separate installs. If you want that same effect in a single continuous fabric instead of two, our day/night blinds do the same job a different way.

Why we specify roller blinds this way here

Because Simon’s Town faces east onto the sheltered water of Simon’s Bay, the glare problem is a morning one, not the afternoon problem an open west-facing suburb solves — so sunscreen openness and blockout placement get decided room by room, not by a single rule for the whole house. On the newer harbour-view builds up the slope, wide glass spans usually take a cassette-fascia roller or a motorised, linked pair rather than one very wide blind with a visible join line. On the older St George’s Street stock, deep sash reveals and out-of-square heritage frames mean the measure is taken on site, never phoned in.

Honest limitations

A single roller runs to roughly 3m of fabric width before a join line or a motorised, linked second blind becomes the better answer — we’ll flag that at the measure rather than let a join line surprise you. On the more traditional fisherman’s-cottage end of the housing stock, a timber venetian often suits the room’s character better than a roller’s flat fabric line.

Where else on the coast we fit this

Sunscreen roller fabric does the same glare-cutting work on Kalk Bay’s Main Road shopfronts, and blockout roller blinds are the standard answer in St James’s small seafront holiday cottages — both a short drive up the same stretch of False Bay.