Blinds in Menlo Park

Menlo Park's houses were built with rooms and are being rebuilt without them. The kitchen comes out into the dining room, the back wall becomes a three- or four-metre stack door, and suddenly the window treatment has to cover a span nothing in the original house ever had.

Before you read on. The Waterkloof Sun & Reveal Field Guide covers the sun angles and elevation-by-elevation reasoning behind everything below, with sources, for the whole area this site serves.

What we usually specify here

Panel blinds are the calmest solution on a wide opening: flat fabric planes sliding on a multi-channel track, stacking to a fraction of the glass, with almost no visible mechanism. Where the budget matters more than the line, vertical blinds do the same job economically and tilt for afternoon glare. Both are worth motorising at that width, and a motor across a whole elevation means the blinds are actually level with each other — which hand-drawing never quite achieves.

Elsewhere in the house it is ordinary good practice: blockout in the children's rooms, an aluminium venetian over the kitchen sink, and a cellular blind in the west-facing study that gets hot at four and cold at seven.

The practical constraints

• Stack doors need the blind track set clear of the door's own stacking width — measured on site, with the door open.
• Renovations are the right moment to plan a concealed blind box; once the ceiling closes, the option is gone.
• Family homes get child-safe controls as standard — tensioned chains, or cordless and motorised where the windows are low.