Camps Bay Villa

WORDS Annette Klinger PHOTOS Paris Brummer PRODUCTION Mark Serra


Hygge? She’ll pass, says German interior designer Daniela Gottschalk, whose Camps Bay villa has attracted its fair share of location scouts and influencers with its irrepressibly OTT interior.

Restauranteur. Bar owner. Psychotherapist. Interior designer. As far as CVs go, Daniela Gottschalk’s is quite prolific. But there’s a linearity to the professions, as the Frankfurt-based Cape Town semi-grant tells it: “Twenty years ago, I opened a restaurant; after that, I opened a bar. At the bar, people would buy a drink… and want to tell me all their problems. I said, okay, I’m not listening to all that for a cappuccino – so I qualified as a psychotherapist.”

The interior design bug officially bit in 2015, when friends asked Daniela to decorate the interior of a holistic boutique hotel in Split, Croatia – and after that, the job offers started streaming in. “I figured out that I never actually needed to open a bar or restaurant in the first place, because all I’d actually wanted was to design their interiors,” she says.

Having visited and fallen in love with Cape Town in 2007, Daniela’s dream to buy and renovate a house in the Mother City finally came true last year when she bagged an old Camps Bay fixer-upper. “I’d collected furniture over the last three years without even knowing what kind of house I was going to buy,” says Daniela. “I knew I wanted a property that would allow me to style it like something from Palm Springs in the 1960s, where you could imagine Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton sipping martinis next to the pool and listening to Frank Sinatra.”

To help turn her vision into reality, Daniela roped in local construction contractor Debbie Verreyne to start the revamp, while she directed the process from Frankfurt – from redoing the floors to knocking out a wall between a pokey kitchen and dining room. The pair worked together so well that they went on to found interior-design company Tinzeltown. For all the meticulous planning, the one thing Daniela hadn’t counted on was the fact that the shipping container filled with designer furniture that she’d dispatched from Germany would only arrive the day before her South African visitor’s visa was set to expire. “I managed to extend my stay by five days; in that time, I basically decorated the whole house,” she says. Aesthetically, there is a definite leitmotif at play: curved arches, varying shades of turquoise and lime green, graphic black-and-white designs, and accents of postbox red and metallic bling. Think sexy Mid-century Modern meets Pop Art. “I wanted everything to be a bit over-stimulating and larger than life,” she says. “Home interiors don’t all need to be shabby-chic, or hygge in whites and beiges.”

Ironically, the Jonathan Adler mouths that pop up in various places – from the polka-dotted chair in the living room to the collection of ashtrays on display in the brass Maisons du Monde shelf in the hallway – are not a nod to the fact that Daniela makes a living from listening to people talk. “I’m just a little bit obsessed with them,” she says. “Jonathan Adler is my design icon.”

Colourful Camps Bay Villa
Eat your heart out, Palm Springs!

A notable stylistic departure is the bathroom, with its opulent blue-and-black marble tiles and gilt- framed his-and-hers vanity. “I wanted it to be a place to calm down; a kind of posh, elegant spa.”

You might wonder: does the kaleidoscopic, slightly zany interior have any psychological significance? “I always say, the more structured you are on the inside, the more chaos you can accept on the outside – and it’s the same with colour,” says Daniela. “I mean, I definitely don’t think it’s for everyone, but for the people that it is for… they’ll feel like they’re in their very own butterfly sanctuary.”


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