Blinds in Sea Point

Sea Point sits at sea level below Fresnaye and Bantry Bay, a long promenade suburb running from the Sea Point pool area up towards Green Point. The building stock is different from the terraced villas higher up the mountain: mostly sectional-title apartment blocks rather than architect-built houses, many of them older post-war buildings alongside newer developments, most facing the promenade and the open Atlantic directly.

That changes the shape of the job more than the exposure does. A Sea Point apartment usually has fewer, more standard-sized windows than a multi-level Fresnaye villa, so the work here is more often a full building's worth of similar units than one large, varied house. Wind and salt are still the two constants — a promenade-facing unit gets spray and gusts as directly as anything higher up the slope — and almost every building runs under a body corporate with clear rules on what can go up facing the street. Where those rules do allow something on the outside, external venetians are usually the tidiest answer, because they sit flat against the facade and stop the heat before it reaches the glass.