Kalk Bay
Naval heritage streets with sash windows that deserve proper treatment.
The naval-era streets here are full of proper sash windows, and a sash is a different animal from a modern casement when it comes to fitting a blind. It opens by sliding vertically, which means the upper and lower panes both move within the same frame and anything hung in front has to clear that movement. It usually sits in a deep reveal with a substantial sill. It very often carries catches, stays and a lifting handle that stand proud into the exact space a blind wants to occupy. And after this long by the sea, few of them are still perfectly square.
So the measure here takes longer than it does on a modern window, and deliberately so. We check the reveal depth in several places, work out whether the blind can sit inside the joinery without fouling a catch, and decide with you whether to fit within the recess — which keeps the original frame on show and leaves an honest hairline where the opening is out of true — or across the face of it, which covers the irregularity and hides some of the timber. Packing brackets out by a few millimetres is often what separates a blind that runs sweetly for years from one that scuffs itself in the first month.
Like the rest of this shore, Simon’s Town looks out east and south-east across the water, so the demanding light is the low morning sun and the glare it bounces off the surface. Rooms that feel harsh at eight are usually calm again well before lunch, and the useful question is how to take the dazzle out of that first stretch without throwing away the reason the window faces that way. Behind that sits the summer ultraviolet load, which on this coast runs high for months and fades floorboards, rugs and upholstery in rooms that never once feel too warm. And where the ground rises behind the streets, the late sun is cut earlier than you would expect, which makes the afternoons more comfortable than the mornings.
For a heritage sitting room with a water view, a sunscreen roller in a view-keeping openness does the job without competing with the joinery, and a slim cassette keeps the tube out of sight against period timber. Bedrooms take a blockout cloth for the early sunrise, and where the same room owns a view worth keeping by day, the two cloths go on one double bracket. In the dry, set-back rooms — a study, a landing, a lounge one room in from the front — timber venetians sit beautifully against old sash frames and floorboards. Anything facing the water directly, or in a bathroom or kitchen, goes to powder-coated aluminium instead, on coastal-grade fittings.
On an old sash that has moved over the years, a blind fitted inside the reveal will show a slightly uneven margin down one side. That is the opening, not the blind, and no amount of adjustment removes it — face-fixing is the fix, and it costs you some of the visible frame. We will not put timber on a front-row sea-facing window here, because it will warp and stiffen. And every bracket, chain and cassette on these streets is specified for salt, with the plain warning that coastal grades buy years rather than immunity, and a periodic fresh-water wipe is part of keeping them sweet.
Also nearby: St James, Fish Hoek, Muizenberg and Clovelly.
Read The False Bay Window Field Guide → — how the east-facing morning glare, salt air and the south-easter change what belongs on each window here.
