Roller shutters — sun, glare and blackout in one system

Four reasons Big Bay homeowners specify roller shutters

Roller shutters do a job no interior blind can: they close a window off from the outside entirely. That covers four separate problems, and most Big Bay enquiries are really about one or two of them rather than all four.

The first is heat and glare — the slats close over the glass from outside, so the coastal sun never reaches the pane, and a west-facing room stops turning into an oven by mid-afternoon. The second is weather: closed slats take the brunt of a hard south-easter gale or a winter cold front driving rain sideways off the bay, which matters more on an exposed elevation than most people expect until it happens once. The third is total blackout, which holiday homes and shift-pattern households both ask for specifically. The fourth is the quiet one — literally: a closed curtain of air-filled aluminium slats damps both heat transfer and outside noise, which is worth something on a windy stretch of coast where the wind itself is never entirely silent.

Boxes can be surface-mounted onto an existing facade or built into the wall at construction stage, which most Big Bay new-builds do to keep the closed profile invisible. Every roller shutter we fit is motorised as standard, with a manual override, and coastal installs get marine-grade coatings and hardware — with honest maintenance advice at the measure rather than a surprise a few winters in.

What a roller shutter costs

Shutters are the heaviest thing we fit and the pricing reflects the engineering rather than the fabric. Manual, expect R3,500 to R5,500 per square metre installed; motorised, R5,000 to R7,000 per square metre. What you are paying for is an aluminium curtain, side guides, a head box and fixings specified to hold against a coastal wind, in a finish meant to last on a house within sight of the water.

There is a minimum charge on a small opening, and there is a prior question that no price answers: the wall or structure above the window has to take the load, and there has to be room for the guides down each side. That is settled at the free measure, not from a photograph. If the answer is no, we say so and put a different specification in the quote rather than force the fitting.