COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Dook; Adam Letch; Paris Brummer; Elsa Young; Jan Ras; Warren Heath; Nudge Studio
Face brick and breeze blocks are materials often associated with traditional structures, but in the hands of innovative architects, they become tools for creating extraordinary contemporary spaces.
From bold façades to intricate screen walls, these textured face brick and breeze block builds blend modern aesthetics with timeless construction materials.
Contemporary Johannesburg Home
Arrive at this house for the first time, and it is difficult not to have your curiosity piqued by the monolithic façade of clay brick pavers set behind a pink right-angled triangle. Bold and unapologetic of its avant-garde grandeur, it provides an inkling of an entrance. “We’ve nicknamed this house the ‘shape-sorter house’,” says architect Gregory Katz. “Our conceptual journey began with the idea of a cube as an envelope.” Behind this elaborate geometric structure sits an unassuming constricted stretch of entryway leading to an understated front door. Step through it and you’re welcomed into a bright, spacious and airy home flooded with natural light.
Gregory describes the play of light created by the asymmetric windows as the gift that keeps on giving. The space is open and barrier-free, with each area flowing seamlessly into the next. Natural light sweeps through two stately half-moon cutouts on the ground floor. These wide half-cylinder openings frame views of the entire garden, breaking the barrier between indoors and outdoors. Much like the assertive façade, the interior boasts its own kind of confidence. It is a consciously eclectic mix of brightly coloured shapes, with a clean and minimalist aesthetic that serves as a canvas to showcase the homeowners’ green thumb and quirky art collection.
Read the full story on this contemporary Johannesburg home.
Contemporary Rondebosch Home
Rondebosch, a Cape Town suburb with a distinctly colonial air, is not the neighbourhood one would expect to find cutting-edge architectural design, so the first glimpse of this ultramodern structure comes as something of a surprise.
Designed for a young family, the house offers relaxed living and is ideally suited to the South African indoor-outdoor lifestyle. In a nod to decades-old construction elements used extensively in the area, the architects used standard precast concrete breeze blocks in the construction of a striking screen wall that acts as the “face” of the dwelling.
“It allows light to permeate while providing privacy and dappled light to the guest wing and terrace,” say the Three14 Architects design team of Kim Benatar, Sian Fisher and Miles Appelgryn. “The client’s brief called for a contemporary, open-plan home that offers a relaxed lifestyle and takes advantage of the site and the views.” The design ticks all those boxes and more.
Read the full story on this contemporary Rondebosch home.
Somerset West Church
When an existing church in the winelands of Somerset West became too small for its growing congregation, architect Jo Noero created an extraordinary new space. “As the new church needed to expand and contract easily to accommodate 450 to 900 people depending on the occasion, we converted the original church into a hall and performance space and built a new one approximately 25 metres away,” Jo says. A grassed courtyard links the two buildings – now converted into a hall and performance space – while the covered colonnade provides access to all spaces from the entrance gate.
Working closely with the minister, Gavin Millard, who trained as an architect before entering the ministry, Jo conceptualised a circular inner “drum”, large enough to accommodate 450 people. To incorporate the additional Christ Church congregation, a roofed square space fans out from the main circle, like a generous skirt. The dramatic vertical dimension of this circular space means the minister is never more than 15 metres from anyone in the audience.
Read the full story on this Somerset West Church.
Modernist Durban Home
On first encounter, House Shaw is brutally simple: a series of three-dimensional boxes, positioned beside and on top of one another on a long, triangular site cut into one of the steep slopes that characterise Durban’s forested university suburb. It is made of face brick, concrete, louvre windows, shutters and a bit of aluminium; no need for paint, wallpaper, air conditioning – not even curtains.
The house belongs to Colleen Wygers, who lived here with her late husband, fellow architect Paul Wygers. Sadly, Paul passed away shortly after we photographed the house; with Colleen’s permission, we’ve included his observations from that interview.
Paul liked to describe the home as Modernism morphing the heritage Durban veranda home – and, when it went onto the market in 2013, the couple bought it within hours of their first viewing. Designed by Hallen and Dibb Architects in the 1960s, it had been commissioned by legal luminary Douglas Shaw. “Douglas Shaw was sitting in an Eames chair in the lounge,” recalled Paul. “We chatted briefly about art and architecture. I don’t think he wanted to leave.”
Read the full story on this modernist Durban home.
Greenside Home
It takes a good eye to spot potential in a fixer-upper, particularly in a city like Johannesburg. There are some real gems – almost always undervalued – but their qualities are often lost beneath the add-ons that barnacle their way onto houses over time. Christo Vermeulen and Nico Venter are serial renovators. Inevitably, after a few years of living in a house, they find their eyes wandering.
They most certainly do have a knack for recognising the signs that something special might be lurking beneath the surface a nondescript exterior. Christo is a former textile designer turned builder/renovator – with a sideline in manufacturing bespoke features, especially metalwork and ironmongery – and Nico is an urban designer with an interest in the city’s architectural history. Together, they make a formidable team: insightful and capable, with the perfect combination of vision and respect for the innate qualities of a good find.
Read the full story on this Greenside home.
Pinelands Home
There’s a certain witchiness to Robert Silke‘s new family home in the Cape Town suburb of Pinelands. A darkly dramatic front gate framed by a brick archway reading Caverswall opens onto a narrow garden path, which leads you to a house that’s equal parts imposing and intriguing, with a steeply pitched, clay-tiled roof, spiral chimneys and brickwork finish – all in the same burnt-honey shade. “It’s basically a gingerbread house, right?” says Robert, taking in the facade of the 1938 Arts and Crafts Revival structure he shares with partner Gideon and their one-year-old daughter Lilith.
“Pinelands was established in the 1920s, when there was a big push around the world for an approximation of English country living,” says Robert. “There was a planner in the UK called Ebenezer Howard, who invented the suburb, which he originally called a garden city. The idea gained global traction in reaction to the Spanish flu – people felt that the way they lived in cities wasn’t healthy. Pinelands was actually the third garden city in the world.”
Read the full story on this Pinelands home.
Johannesburg House
What Toni Twidale wanted even more than a house was to live among the trees. “I wanted to see green all the time,” says Toni, who owns this home with her partner Graeme. “I wanted the outside in.” And so they decided to build a house that would, more than anything, be about the site.
The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, known locally for his creative, experimental and often unconventional approach. Toni wanted to keep all the indigenous trees; Gregory’s brief, therefore, became something of a mathematical puzzle around fitting the dimensions of a house between the trees. In the end, he settled on two long, slim “bars”, with alternating strips of open space on either side and between them for the driveway, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an “umbilical cord” – a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site. The branches of the trees reach up and over a flat concrete roof, which is planted with wavy grass, essentially lifting what would have been on the ground up a level, and adding to the greenery.
Read the full story on this Johannesburg house.
Vredehoek Home
When Robyn and Clinton Campbell took the plunge and bought their first stand-alone property in Cape Town’s Vredehoek four years ago, they settled on 235m² with an existing house on it. Their initial plan was to keep some of the original house and go up by way of a major renovation, but that was thwarted when the foundations were found to be wanting.
Having to get their heads around a full demolition, the couple fortunately had a friend in architect Michael Lumby of ML-A, whose bold and honest use of materials was an aesthetic they both loved. “Our brief was pretty open,” says Clinton, “but budget was a major consideration, and we knew that the challenge would be to find simple and cost-effective solutions that wouldn’t compromise the creative vision.”
Known for his contextual cleverness and innovative approach to well-planned, efficient spaces, Michael came up with a design of unexpectedly generous spaces for such a small home. “My idea was to step the house down in sync with the slope, thus allowing the spaces to open up as you move through it,” he explains.
Read the full story on this Vredehoek home.
House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys
In a private reserve in the Waterberg, three hours north of Johannesburg, a series of buildings crouches camouflaged in a forest. You’d struggle to see them among the dense foliage, even from above. Two of those buildings – House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys – constitute the home of a pair of veterinary scientists, a husband and wife whose passion for nature and the great outdoors drew them to this wild corner of the country.
Owing to its location on a 5 000-hectare farm-turned nature reserve, it’s not uncommon to see giraffe, leopard or genet, and an abundance of birds, from the paradise flycatcher to the yellow-bellied greenbul. It was during a ramble here that the owners came across a sandstone promontory that plunges into the riverine forest below, and decided that this very spot was to be their home.
As if contending with a steep gradient in a forest in the middle of the bushveld wasn’t enough to challenge their architect, their brief to him was “simply” to construct a tree house, without removing a single tree from the site. The young architect, who collaborates with a host of brilliant minds under the collective pseudonym Frankie Pappas, had the site Lidar-scanned to map the all-important trees.
Read the full story on this Waterberg Home.
Calling Academy
Located on a bucolic plot bordering Polkadraai Road between Stellenbosch and Kuilsriver, the site was allocated by the previous generation of surrounding landowners to serve the local farming community and originally comprised six existing classrooms, a reception and sports field.
An annual increase in grade intakes compounded by a matrix of constrictions required SALT Architects to implement a fluxive, organic design process that simultaneously maximises the quality of the learning environment and centres the natural beauty of the site, at the lowest possible cost. The guiding principle is the prioritisation of quality education over the cost of facilities.
Read the full story on the Calling Academy.
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