Between the mountain and the market

A great deal of Oranjezicht is old enough for this to matter. The National Heritage Resources Act protects any structure, or part of one, older than sixty years: it cannot be altered or demolished without a permit, and in this province the authority is Heritage Western Cape. On top of that, the City’s Heritage Protection Overlay Zone takes in the lower half of the suburb and adds development rules over the base zoning. The line we draw is a practical one. A blind fitted inside the reveal is a furnishing decision and alters nothing. Anything fixed to the outside of the facade — an awning cassette, external rails, a headbox — is a change to part of a structure and may need a permit. We can supply slim profiles, quiet colours and the product data an application asks for; we do not submit applications, and we will not tell you approval is a formality.

The original windows ask for restraint. Fifty-millimetre timber slats sit at roughly the rhythm of a multi-pane sash’s glazing bars, so the window still reads as the one the house was built with, and tilting them upward bounces daylight off the ceiling instead of onto a desk. Past about two metres wide we would split the opening or motorise it rather than hang a blind fighting its own weight. Kitchens, bathrooms and sculleries get aluminium instead, because timber does not take steam or scrubbing.

Behind the house the brief usually changes completely. Extension glass onto the garden is modern, wide and often frameless, and it takes long afternoon sun that the street front never sees. Sunscreen there, blockout in the bedrooms, and one fabric and colour repeated along a run of matching front windows so the elevation reads as a single scheme rather than a row of separate fixes. Both halves of the house get measured and quoted on the same visit.