Shade that holds in a southeaster

Everything here is cut on our own floor

Luifel started in 2009 with one industrial machine in a garage in Wellington and a run of sails for a guesthouse that kept losing its umbrellas to the wind. We are eleven people now, in a loft off Berg River Boulevard in Paarl, and the work has not really changed: somebody measures the site, somebody chalks the panels out on the floor, and somebody sits at a machine for a day and a half putting the webbing on. We buy cloth by the roll from two mills and cut it here, which is the only reason we can build a sail to the shape your yard actually is instead of to the nearest catalogue square. A stoep with a wall running out of square is normal. So is a pool deck with a gum tree in the wrong place. We would rather cut a five-sided sail than tell you to move the tree. Fitting teams go out Tuesdays and Thursdays — the Boland and the Cape Flats every week, the Garden Route and the Highveld once a month. Everything else leaves folded, with the rigging, the anchor spec and a diagram that makes sense to whoever you get to hang it.