Turns a baking deck back into a room
A north- or west-facing patio on a Blue Hills stand can be unusable through the middle of a highveld summer day — and a fixed roof can’t give the winter sun back once it’s up. A folding-arm awning does: retract it in winter, extend it in summer, over a braai area, deck or pool-side entertaining space, with no posts breaking up the view of the paddocks and no clutter around the braai.
How far they reach
Projection runs to roughly the 3–4m class over a wide span, in solution-dyed acrylic fabrics chosen to hold their colour under South African UV rather than fade out in a season or two.
The Highveld storm-season spec
This is the one product on a Blue Hills home where motorisation isn’t really an upsell — it’s the responsible spec. October to March, an afternoon that looks perfectly clear can turn into a hail-bearing gust front in twenty minutes. An awning caught open in that kind of blow can be destroyed. A motor paired with a wind sensor retracts the awning automatically before the gust arrives, which is the difference between an awning that lasts and one that doesn’t.
Being honest about limitations
An awning is a shade product, not a rain product — fine at a pitch in light drizzle, never intended for storm rain or standing water. Wind ratings are real limits, not suggestions, and the fixing substrate (brick, timber or steel) genuinely changes what’s possible on a given wall, which is why a site assessment is part of every quote rather than an afterthought.
What an awning costs over a Blue Hills patio
Awnings are quoted per square metre of projection — the ground the fabric shades when the arms are out — installed. With a crank, the guide is R3,500 to R5,500 per square metre, the bottom of that range being an open or semi-cassette in a protected spot and the top a full cassette in the open. Put a motor and a wind sensor on it and the band moves to R5,500 – R7,500 per square metre.
Where a patio looks out over open grazing with nothing upwind, we would put the motor and sensor ahead of extra width every time; an awning that pulls itself in before a Highveld storm arrives is the one still there next summer. A narrow awning above a door carries a minimum charge, and what the brackets are fixed into shifts the figure as well. The site assessment settles that, and the written quote afterwards carries your real price.