Privacy Fencing: Your Options Compared
There are three levers — spacing, profile and height — and each one costs you something. Here is how to pick.
Define the problem first
Privacy is not a general property, it is a relationship between you, a specific viewer and a specific position. Before choosing anything, work out who is actually looking and from where.
A passer-by on the footpath, ten metres away and at ground level, is screened by a very different fence to a neighbour standing on an elevated deck five metres away.
Go and stand in the viewer's position and look back at what you want hidden. That single exercise tells you more than any product comparison, and often reveals that you only need to screen one section rather than the whole boundary.
Lever one: slat spacing
Closing the gap between slats is the cheapest way to increase privacy and the first thing to try. It works well, up to a point.
What it costs you is airflow and wind load. As the open area falls, the panel catches progressively more wind, which flows into the framing, posts and footings — and into how the fence behaves in a storm.
For a modest run in a sheltered position, tightening the spacing is usually the right answer and the most economical one.
Lever two: louvre
Louvre achieves privacy through blade angle rather than gap size, which means the air path stays open. On the sightline the blades are set against there is no straight view through the panel.
It costs more — there is more aluminium per square metre — and the panels are heavier. But on a large or exposed boundary that extra cost often buys back savings in framing and posts that a very tightly spaced slat panel would have needed.
Louvre is also the only option that lets you aim the privacy. Against an elevated sightline — a neighbour's upstairs window — the blade angle can be set for that specific view in a way slat spacing simply cannot.
- Sheltered, modest run: tighten the slat spacing
- Large or exposed run needing high privacy: compare against louvre
- Elevated sightline from a specific window: louvre, angled for it
- Whole boundary versus one section: often only one section is needed
Lever three: height
Adding height is the most obvious lever and often the wrong one. It is the most expensive way to buy privacy, it has the biggest effect on wind load, and it is the one most likely to run into local planning controls.
Fence and screen heights are frequently subject to council controls, particularly at the front boundary and in heritage conservation areas. Those controls vary and we cannot advise you on them — check with your council before designing around a height.
Where height genuinely is the answer, adding a screen above an existing fence or wall is often better than replacing the whole thing. Panels above a retaining wall, as in our photography, is exactly that approach.
