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.