The established heart of greater Bedfordview.

Bedford Gardens

Period proportions, and windows that deserve them.

Bedford Gardens is the older, greener heart of greater Bedfordview — tree-lined streets, deep gardens, and houses built when a room was expected to have proportion rather than square metres. It is also the part of our patch where the wrong blind is most obvious, because the architecture is doing something specific and a minimal off-the-shelf fitting simply fights it.

Homes here

Expect corniced ceilings, picture rails, tall narrow windows set in deep plastered reveals, and the occasional bay or arched opening that nobody wants to lose. Alongside them, a steady layer of newer cluster and townhouse development has infilled parts of the suburb with a completely different window language — aluminium sliders, wider spans, lower ceilings. One measure often covers both in the same street.

Fitting inside a deep reveal

The reveal is the decision. Mounted inside it, a blind keeps the architrave visible and the room reads as it was designed to — but the reveal has to be deep enough and square enough to take the headbox, and a hundred-year-old opening rarely is. Mounted on the face, you gain coverage and lose a little of the detail. We measure both options at the visit, tell you which one the window will actually accept, and quote the honest answer rather than the easy one.

Products that suit Bedford Gardens

50mm timber venetians are the natural fit for the older rooms — the material warmth suits picture rails and stained joinery, and the tilt handles a tall window far better than raising and lowering ever will. In bathrooms and kitchens the same blind in aluminium takes the steam without complaint. For the newer clusters, a slim recess-mounted roller in sunscreen keeps a modern opening clean, and shaped blinds handle the arched and gable glass that older Bedford Gardens homes throw at us more than anywhere else in the suburb. Where a covered stoep has been added, a folding-arm awning extends it without touching the roofline.