Shutters and Blinds Albion Park

Albion Park sits on the traditional lands of the Dharawal people, who moved between the escarpment, the flats along Macquarie Rivulet and the shores of Lake Illawarra for thousands of years before European settlement. The township was laid out in the 1850s as a service centre for the dairy farms that spread across the fertile flats beneath Macquarie Pass, and for more than a century the town revolved around dairying, the showground and the annual Albion Park Show. The railway arrived on the flats to the east in the 1880s, which is how Albion Park Rail came to be a separate village with its own identity. For most of the twentieth century Albion Park stayed a country town, but that changed as Wollongong and Shellharbour grew. Brick veneer estates filled in around the old village through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the Illawarra Regional Airport at Albion Park Rail became home to the HARS aviation museum, and in the last decade the Calderwood Valley and Tullimbar estates have pushed the town west to the foot of the escarpment. The Albion Park Rail bypass, opened in 2022, took the highway traffic out of the main street and made the trip to Wollongong or down the coast a good deal quicker. That history shows in the housing. Around Tongarra Road and the showground are the original weatherboard and brick cottages, many of them a century old, with timber sash windows and verandahs facing the street. The estates of the 1970s to 1990s are single-storey brick veneer on generous blocks, with aluminium sliding windows and a covered patio out the back. Calderwood and Tullimbar are the opposite: two-storey homes on compact lots, open-plan living, floor-to-ceiling glass and alfresco areas that look straight up at the escarpment. Each of those homes needs something different. Older cottages rarely have a square window opening, so plantation shutters have to be measured and made to the millimetre rather than bought off a rack. The brick veneer homes cop a hard western sun in the afternoon, and blockout roller blinds or polymer shutters on the west-facing rooms make a real difference to summer heat and winter warmth alike. In the new estates the priorities are privacy from close neighbours and shade for the alfresco, which is where sheer curtains, panel blinds on the sliding doors and outdoor blinds earn their keep. Salt air from the lake and the coast also means aluminium and polymer shutters generally outlast timber on exposed elevations. Fusion Shutters & Blinds installs across Albion Park, Albion Park Rail, Calderwood, Tullimbar and the wider Shellharbour area from our showroom at Smeaton Grange. We bring the full sample range to your home, measure every window ourselves and quote on the spot, with no obligation. If you would like to see the products first, the showroom on Gallipoli Street is open six days a week, or book a free in-home measure and quote and we will come to you.