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Winelands Villa : On the veranda, pots and pictures of flowers sit alongside a wire goat, reminiscent of Heather’s pet who once roamed the garden. -
Winelands Villa : Botanical-print cards frame a wreath above the lounge fireplace, where furniture from now and way back sit side by side. -
Winelands Villa : Heather has arranged old pictures above her still-life of flowers and china, flanked by an old cupboard and a rescued lampshade. -
Winelands Villa : Fresh blooms wind their way into the patterns of Heather’s fine kitchen china. -
Winelands Villa : In a corner of the lounge, an arrangement of vintage frocks on wooden hangers presides over a pair of antique chairs. -
Winelands Villa : Tulle balls, glass droplets and a tilted lampshade make for an enchanted dining experience. -
Winelands Villa : Moving things around is what Heather does. In the lounge, she has given antique chairs a cushion-overhaul, while a row of glass bottles adorn the mantlepiece. -
Winelands Villa : Three found vintage dresses hang on a lounge wall, and an assortment of rose-print cushions are tied together with velvet ribbon. -
Winelands Villa : Bright bunting is strung among dried bushes of hydrangeas across Heather’s workroom desk. -
Winelands Villa : Heather keeps the main bedroom in light shades, interspersed with accents of colour and trimmings of family life. -
Winelands Villa : In the upstairs passage, painted brick walls and open beams provide the perfect backdrop for spurts of inspiration. -
Winelands Villa : Heather Arnold, with ridgebacks Nillo and Nache, picking lemons from the orchard.
PHOTOS Inge Prins PRODUCTION Sumien Brink WORDS Debbie Loots
On a hill, surrounded by Stellenbosch’s mountains and vineyards, is a farmhouse with a big garden. Here, owner Heather Arnold gets her hands dirty, but also spends time inside creating stories with old pictures, velvet ribbon and books.
Heather Arnold remembers her mother’s curtains from when she was a little girl. They were red-and-white striped brocade and she didn’t care for them. Today she would love those old curtains, and wonders what happened to them.
She also remembers that her mother never changed her house, at all. She didn’t move the furniture, or anything else around. Ever. Heather does, all the time.
The self-taught artisan’s home is a 14-year-old double-storey farmhouse she shares with her winemaker husband, Kevin. Designed by architect Michael Dall, it’s the type of home they’ve always wanted – a stone house, its facade clad with rock earthed from their farm.
Right from the start of construction, she and Kevin were very clear about details such as the open beams throughout, the rugged whitewashed brick walls, and the reed ceilings in the main bedroom and kitchen. Their three now-adult children were still living at home then, and they wanted the house to have a relaxed country feeling.
With time marching on as it does, the house has settled into itself. All its rooms have soft-shaded furniture, rugged walls and high ceilings, and many double doors opening up to every side of the garden. All of it a simple backdrop to showcase Heather’s innate tendency to move things around her home.
It looks as if she creates little stories with objects and knick-knacks: antique dresses with an old framed painting of an unknown landscape are grouped with magazine cuttings. She does it in all the corners of the rooms, even inside and beside the fireplaces, across the large windows of the staircase, the bathrooms and the bedrooms. Somehow, she does it in a way that makes things sit next to each other naturally, as if they belong together, forever. But they don’t. As we know, she changes things around, all the time.
Heather finds her treasures in special shops, where she looks for anything that catches her eye, from a lampshade covered in woolly fur (which reminds her of the 10 pet goats that used to roam around her garden), to handmade cards with botanical prints. For now they are simply stuck onto the facade of a fireplace, subtle and charming. Just the other day, she happened on some velvet ribbon and decided to bind together the rose-printed cushions on the sofa. Then she noticed that many of the books on the ceiling-to-floor bookshelf needed to be turned around to bare their creamy yellow sides. It fitted with the colour of the ribbon.
Heather has a room of her own beside the staircase, which she would have called her office, if she had one. It is here where she brings her special finds to be unpacked or unwrapped and where she sometimes leaves things for a bit. While looking at the fabric piles topped with magazine cut-outs, and threads of happy bunting weaving its colours into dried hydrangeas stuck into a chandelier, Heather explains that she doesn’t like things to look too complete, too perfect. Unfinished stories mean there’s more to be told…
Outside on the veranda, the one where the dining room’s double doors open up to look across a stone pond and vineyards, the stories continue. Beautiful old floral tapestries are loosely bound to the back of chairs, their stitched toil framed by the sunlight caught at certain times of the day.
While standing here, Heather the collector confesses to being a gardener, and that the entire layout of their expansive garden – from deciding where the vegetable and herb patch should be, right to the forms of the many flowerbeds and the faraway fruit-treed lane – is her handiwork.
But gardening is for another day, she says as she turns around to make tea in her pink antique set, something beautiful she inherited from her mother.
Michael Dall Architects, 021 797 8102, mdarch.co.za
