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A Free Shading Guide — Inanda, Sandton
01 — The ground here
Inanda is tiny and unusual: 0.55 km², 842 residents at the 2011 census[1] — a pocket of large stands wrapped around a polo ground about 1.5 km from Sandton City[1], bordered by Atholl, Illovo and Parkmore[2]. It was farmland before Sandton grew around it[2][3]; the club at its centre opened in April 1935[4]. (This is the Sandton Inanda — the polo one — not its namesake in KwaZulu-Natal.)
Nothing next door is shading you. On a denser stand a neighbour's wall quietly removes an hour of early or late sun from your glass. Here the properties are large[2], the streets are wide[3], and there is open ground in the middle of the suburb — so the sun reaches your glazing uninterrupted all day.
The glass is aimed at the view, not the street. When the outlook is a paddock, living areas get built to face it and the glazing runs wider than a standard window. That shifts the question from "which fabric" to "how does this get operated twice a day" — a chain across a four-metre span stops being reasonable fast.
The trees shade you generously, for half the year. Inanda sits in a corridor of green with mature old trees[2], and Johannesburg holds roughly six million trees, 4.8 million of them in private gardens[6]. A deciduous canopy takes the edge off January and is bare by July, so a room's light budget swings twice a year: with the sun's angle, and with the leaves. One observation of our own, not a cited fact: on a stand with a working yard, fine sand travels onto slats and fabrics.
02 — The light here
Inanda sits at roughly 26.12° south[1], on a plateau — Johannesburg stands 1,753 m above sea level[6]. The nearest published sun-geometry work is calculated for Pretoria, half a degree north, and holds here to within a degree: at solar noon the sun reaches 87.7° above the horizon on 21 December and only 40.84° on 20 June[5]. That 47-degree swing splits the year in two.
Midsummer noon is nearly overhead, so a north window with any eave above it largely shades itself in January. In midwinter the sun sits at about 41° and due north, driving warmth deep into the room — which, with June and July nights near 4.1 °C and the odd frost[6], you want. Blanking that out is a real loss, not a neutral choice.
The afternoon is the problem. On 21 December the sun sets at an azimuth of 243.35° — about 27 degrees south of due west[5]. From mid-afternoon it arrives low and almost horizontally, and an overhang cannot block a horizontal ray: the same study notes how much hotter western-exposure afternoons run than mornings, and that horizontal overhangs suit high, altitude-dominated angles — northern facades — not low ones[5]. On the west you need something at the glass or outside it, not above it.
03 — Room by room
One house, four problems. Work out which wall a room sits on first — it decides more than the fabric does.
North is where the sun lives all winter: high enough in midsummer that an eave does much of the work, then at about 41° and pouring straight in by June[5].
Living rooms and studies want something adjustable — light thrown onto the ceiling in January, open flat in July. A blockout roller is blunt here: down costs the winter warmth you were entitled to.
Low, near-horizontal sun from mid-afternoon, arriving 27 degrees south of west at midsummer[5], across ground with nothing on it to break the light. This is where wide Inanda glazing hurts most.
If a west room is unbearable by four, the glass itself is heating and radiating inwards. An interior blind fixes the glare at once and the heat only partly — once the sun is through the pane, the energy is in the room.
The same geometry mirrored — a midsummer sunrise at azimuth 116.62°[5] — into a house that cooled overnight. Bedrooms wake with it; a kitchen takes an hour of glare and it's over.
Two rooms on one wall wanting opposite things: properly dark where you sleep, still see-through where you make coffee.
Almost no direct sun for most of the year, so south rooms hold the steadiest light in the house — and are the coldest come June[6].
Shading is rarely the problem here; heat loss through a big pane usually is. On a large stand the south face also tends to look at the working yard, which makes it a privacy question too.
Optional
Tell us which rooms are giving you trouble and we'll email you this same guide with your elevations noted against it — which windows we'd treat first, and what we'd be weighing up on each one.
It's an email, not a visit. Nobody phones you about it.
04 — The specification
Each is right somewhere in this suburb and wrong somewhere else; the trade-off box is what brochures leave out. Add anything that sounds like your house — it carries into the form below.
One flat sheet of open-weave fabric on a slim tube — no folds. It cuts glare and a useful share of the solar gain while the paddock stays visible. Better here than a heavy curtain, which solves four o'clock by deleting the view.
It reverses after dark: lights on inside, and you are the display. Where the approach road is close, pair it with a blockout on a double bracket.
A single smooth sheet with no folds to hold the dust off open ground. Against a December sunrise on an east bedroom window, nothing beats it.
Binary — down is dark, up is everything — so it is the wrong tool on a north living room where the winter sun is worth keeping. Without side channels, light finds the reveal edge.
Alternating sheer and solid bands on one tube: shift them and you go from open view to full privacy without going dark — which a plain blockout cannot do.
It is not a blockout, so a light sleeper still wakes with the sun — and the banded look is a design decision in itself.
On north glass the useful control is angle, not coverage: a venetian throws high summer sun onto the ceiling and opens flat in June, so one product covers both ends of that 47-degree swing[5] where a roller can only be up or down.
Slats collect dust — on an open stand, a real chore. A very wide span splits across more than one headrail. Timber above a bath ages badly.
Aluminium slats in side guides, mounted outside the glass, tilting the sun away before it reaches the pane. On a hard west elevation we would specify these over an interior blockout roller for a physical reason: heat stopped outside the glass never becomes a warm pane radiating at you all evening — and you keep a view between the slats.
Dearer than an interior blind, it changes the facade, and it lives outdoors in a hail belt[7]. We would motorise it with a wind sensor so it retracts before the gusts build.
The fabric cells hold still air against the glass. On a cold south room, or a double volume that sheds its heat while the thermometer heads for 4 °C[6], it out-performs any single-layer blind.
The gain sits on the winter side of the ledger — not a heat-rejection answer on a hot west wall, and a soft product, so wrong in a busy kitchen.
Rigid aluminium slats rolling down from a headbox outside the building, covering the whole opening — sun, heat and glare handled before the glass, and darker than any interior blind when fully closed.
Shading, not security. These are made for sun, heat and glare control. They are not security-rated shutters — a different product entirely, which we can quote on request.
The most visible exterior change on this list, and the headbox has to live somewhere — a design decision, not a measurement. Closed is closed: coverage, not adjustable light.
Where the outdoor room is the point of the house — as it usually is here — an awning over the paving buys more usable house than anything you could do to a window, and unlike a fixed roof it folds away for the winter sun.
Storms roll through most summer afternoons[6] and this is hail country[7], so we would specify a wind sensor and a cassette that closes over the fabric.
Also at the foot: vertical & panel blinds for stacking doors, zip screens to hold an open patio against wind, skylight & shaped blinds for gable glass, concealed / recessed blinds where a ceiling can still be planned around them, motorised curtain tracks, and motorisation — which on wide glass decides whether a blind gets used at all.
05 — The local constraint
Inanda is dominated by large freehold stands[2]. If yours is one, nobody's permission is needed for an awning, an external venetian or a roller shutter.
Inside a sectional-title scheme the rule is different. Under the prescribed conduct rules made with the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act, an owner must not, without the trustees' written consent, change the external appearance of a section or its exclusive-use area, unless the change is minor and does not detract from the appearance[10].
We fit blinds; we won't speak for your trustees. At the measure we say plainly which options touch the outside, so the right question reaches the right person before anything is ordered.
Building or renovating? Get us in early: a concealed ceiling recess has to exist before the ceiling closes. SANS 10400-XA:2021 also requires a fenestration calculation once glazing passes 20% of floor area — up from 15% — and no longer distinguishes the solar heat gain requirements of west, north and east glazing[9]. On a house built around a paddock view that calculation arrives sooner than owners expect.
06 — The honest limit of a guide
Everything above is what we know about Inanda. What no page can know is your house — and five things decide the actual specification, all settled in about an hour with a tape, a compass and a torch.
Depth decides whether a blind can sit inside the opening at all, and how much light creeps around the edge. Openings are rarely square, and a few millimetres changes how the blind is made.
Plaster over brick, a later drywall addition, or an aluminium frame with nothing behind it. The fixings decide what can safely hang there — and outside, whether the job is possible at all.
We take a compass reading, because twenty degrees moves the answer between west and south-west. Then we look out: the tree doing half your shading differs at every window, and half of it falls off in winter[6].
For anything motorised the constraint is the route from a power point to the top of the opening — battery or wired, chased in or surface-run. A walk-around with a torch, not a guess over the phone.
Awnings and zip screens live or die on this. A sheltered courtyard and a veranda facing down an open paddock want different products, fixings and sensor settings — obvious in two minutes on the paving.
07 — Two ways forward
A consultant comes to the house with samples, measures every window properly, and leaves you with a quote itemised per window. It costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If you'd rather have a rough number first, the ballpark window list sits inside the form below.
We take five or six measure appointments a week across Inanda and the suburbs around it, so the diary fills early — worth booking ahead if you need a particular day.
Anything you added while reading is already ticked on the form.
Neither, for now
Not ready for a visit or a number? Tell us which rooms are the problem and we'll email this guide with your elevations noted against it. Nobody phones.
Working out
Every geography, climate and legal claim above traces to one of these. Where we've reasoned rather than cited, we've said so in the text.
Three honest caveats. The solar figures in source 5 are calculated for Pretoria at about 25.7° south; Inanda sits at roughly 26.12° south, so its own angles differ by well under half a degree — we have quoted the published figures rather than invent our own. The 1,753 m elevation in source 6 is published for Johannesburg as a city, not surveyed in Inanda; we use it to describe highveld conditions generally, which is what it is good for. And figures circulating online for the polo field's size and the number of horses stabled could not be verified on a first-hand source, so they do not appear above.
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