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Adhering to the estate’s architectural guidelines, Friedrich designed a contemporary farm style house in four parts: a barn, a silo and two sheds, one on the street and one on the pasture. -
Daughter Nõa’s bedroom walls and the walls to the stack away so as to utilise the passage as part of those areas. -
Wilna Strey loves colour. She bought this piece of fabric at a stall in Cape Town, had it stretched over a timber frame and hung over the dining area. -
Some lights were designed and assembled by Friedrich himself. The entrance hall luminaire was made lamp shades Design Team threw out, tied to an old rusted wheelbarrow wheel with electrical cable to be suspended at different levels. The wooden chest is an heirloom – Friedrich’s grandfather brought his tools over in it from Germany in the 1920s. -
Wilna loves local art, especially pieces that are “well-thoughtthrough and have an eclectic, simple feel to them”. The artwork hanging above the dining area, called Raining Cats and Dogs, is by Johan Alberts. -
The shower niche alongside the main bedroom hangs outside the building on the western side, making the most of the views. Friedrich built the bed when Wilna was expecting Nõa. The wire lamp above the bed is from a gardening centre. -
Around the dining table are six different John Vogel chairs. Friedrich designed the hangers for the mirror (which was salvaged when a Stuttafords store was revamped) and the steel legs for the sideboard, and assembled the sideboard together with a piece of roughcut plank he got from Jan “Staal” du Toit from Country Trax. -
The kitchen, which Friedrich outfitted himself, is the heart of the house. Wilna added touches of colour in the form of serving dishes and appliances. The recycled-timber-slat worktop was made by Gary of Woodmade and assembled by Friedrich, and the stools are Konstantin Grcic replicas. -
Friedrich loves this nook, where they enjoy breakfast, read, work and watch the kids play in the garden. The rabbit heads were a gift from a friend of Wilna’s, Marlene Shaw-Roberts. -
Strey Architects is based in the shed in front of the house. The office acts as a barrier the street house, ensuring privacy, and the silo acts as a barrier between the office and house. -
The deck becomes an extension of the lounge when the doors are opened. Leading to a 14 m-long lap pool, it is a popular spot when weather is good. -
These screens, which Friedrich designed and had custom-made, shield the windows from rain and the harsh summer sun, while letting the warm rays of the sun through during winter. -
Friedrich stands at the top of the stairs leading from the front door up to the library, which was designed to afford a 360-degree view of the surroundings while sitting down.
WORDS Friedrich Strey and Katharyn Williams-Jaftha PRODUCTION Annemarie Meintjes IMAGES Dook
Building a home in Southdowns Estate in Irene forced architect and owner Friedrich Strey to dream big and think even bigger. After many years of planning and hard work, the house is everything he could have hoped for.
They say all good things come to those who wait. In this case, patience, determination and hard work got architect Friedrich Strey and his wife Wilna through nearly a decade of planning, designing and constructing the place they now call home: a contemporary farm-style house in Southdowns Estate, Irene. The vision for the house was threefold: “to show that one can be sustainable, even in the city; to experiment with different materials, test the capacity of unskilled labour, and recycle and reuse existing materials; and thirdly to use the building as an office while enjoying the lifestyle a farm in the city has to offer.”
The homestead consists of four structures. A barn houses the living areas and bedrooms. Two sheds house the Strey Architects office and there is a loft apartment constructed from light gauge steel framing. A reclaimed brick silo houses the staircase and library lookout, and acts as a link between the office and the living areas. “Double-glazed stacking doors fold away to blur the boundary between the inside and outside living areas,” says Friedrich. “A timber deck forms an extended living or dining area, as well as a pavilion to the lap pool. The pool also serves as water feature and passive cooling device during the hot Highveld summers.”
In this home everything centres on the kitchen, which, in typical South African fashion, is the heart of the house. “One can watch the kids play in the garden or swim in the pool from the glass niche protruding from the kitchen while sipping a cocktail or catching up on social media,” he says. Friedrich designed and assembled much of the furniture and lighting himself, including the kitchen cabinets. He ingeniously included storage for platters and frying pans in the toe space under the kitchen cupboards. In the children’s bedrooms he designed walls that stack away, maximising the passage space by allowing it to form part of the bedrooms.
Rainwater harvesting for household use, grey-water recycling to irrigate the indigenous garden and photovoltaic panels are just some of the elements utilised. Most of these – and a wine cellar – are housed in the basement, which spans the entire footprint of the house. The house took nearly 10 years from planning to completion, during which time Friedrich experimented with a number of building methods and ended up doing much of the work himself. “Through the building and installing, I gained a lot of experience,” he says. “And in the end it really is everything we could have hoped for and more.”
