Location: Muldersdrift, West Rand · System: Adjustable Louvre — full charcoal
The brief
A double-storey face-brick house with an open upper balcony that caught sun all day and rain all summer. Covering it without losing the light into the rooms behind it is the whole problem.
They also wanted the structure to disappear: no white, no contrast, nothing that would read as an add-on from the driveway.
What we built
An adjustable louvre roof finished charcoal throughout — frame, beams and blades. Against dark window frames and red brick it reads as a shadow line rather than a structure.
The perimeter beam collects run-off and feeds a downpipe taken down the brickwork to ground level, so nothing pours off a first-floor edge onto the ground below. Blades are worked by a gearbox and crank rod within reach from the balcony.
The system itself is set out under Louvre Awnings, and there is more of our work in Roodepoort & the West Rand.
What changes when the roof is upstairs
Everything about a first-floor installation is about water and access. Water, because run-off from an upper roof falls twice as far and lands where people walk. Access, because the blade control has to be usable from the balcony itself, not from a ladder.
Both are decided before anything is manufactured. The downpipe route is agreed on site against the brickwork, and the gearbox goes on the side of the frame you actually approach from.
The specification behind it
- Adjustable aluminium louvre roof — charcoal frame and charcoal blades
- Gearbox and crank rod, reachable from the balcony
- Integrated gutter with a downpipe run to ground level
- 95% watertight in Highveld storms, with a full all-round gutter
- 15-year guarantee on aluminium, 10-year on Chromadek®
Charcoal blades: what you gain and what you give up
A charcoal blade under a charcoal frame gives the cleanest possible exterior — the roof becomes one dark plane and stops competing with the house.
The cost is light. Dark blades absorb rather than bounce, so a room behind a full-charcoal roof sits darker than the same room under white blades. On a balcony open on two sides that is a fair trade. Against a single living-room slider, we would usually talk you into white blades instead.
If you’re considering the same
Ask where the downpipe is going before you sign anything for an upstairs balcony. It is the detail most often left off a quote and the one you will look at every day.
More West Rand projects.
