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Friday hideaway : Alfresco dining under a hand-painted parasol and the wispy bows of a willow. Figs and willows in the Overberg are under siege by the indigenous fig-borer beetle and I can often be spotted digging their larvae from the bark with ferocity. -
Friday hideaway : The chairs cost R30 each, the “rack” under the window is an old bed base and the coloured lightbulbs are pure trailer park. The sphinx-baboon surveys his David Lynchian domain without comment. -
Friday hideaway : "Aunt Martha", a woman I took home in 2002 because I liked the way she'd been framed (and then I couldn't bear to throw her out), stares down Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl. -
Friday hideaway : View from "The Glade" — a fern grove off what will become "The Beach", a pool area. -
Friday hideaway : Out of sight, out of mind. Dark walls and ceilings conceal a multitude of sins, providing relief from poor finishes and detailing. Since we painted the ceilings “espresso” we’ve not had a single rain-spider experience. -
Friday hideaway : Friends are welcome but not expected to stay for long. The wet walls, poor roofing and rising damp of the guest bedroom make conditions a bit rough but Kleinmond Tourism does offer some alternatives! -
Friday hideaway : I leave the garden alone as I am paranoid about interference and can’t bear to cut anything. I feel good when I’m aiding and abetting nature’s hand, unsure when I’m holding it. The garden regulates me more than the other way around.
PHOTOS Lien Botha WORDS Haydn Ellis
With all the long weekends coming up, wouldn’t it be grand to have a second home to escape to? Just like Cape Town architect Haydn Ellis who, come the end of the week, exchanges his urban existence and minimalist home for an “offbeat, crazy sanctuary” in Kleinmond.
When our little gîte was still a baby we called it Friday, a name synonymous with everything it means to us. A weekend retreat from the demands of the city, it is something we always look forward to – the light at the end of what sometimes feels like a tunnel and a place that is about our lives and our time.
We could have called it spookhuis – when we first moved in the response of the locals was of great amusement to us – but the house is softer round the edges now and we thought to keep things friendly.
It was love at first sight when I spotted the property in 2001. I wandered the 120 metres to the bottom of the garden through a neglected wilderness where the grass hadn’t been cut for years and everything had gone wild. It was fantastic: a leafy haven in a suburban street, a verdant sanctuary, neither pretty nor precious, in a sea of prim little landscapes.
The buildings were also neither pretty nor precious: a double garage that had been converted into a humble cottage and an outbuilding with a toilet and store room. With no budget, we gutted the structures and linked them, painted the whole thing rum-and-raisin and bitter chocolate, and planted a forest of shrubs and trees around it.
The inside is a work in progress, an opposite perhaps, to the monochromatic and minimal style of my Cape Town home and the antithesis of the coherent and extremely rigorous designs that characterise the work of my practice.
An eclectic mix
Friday is home to a hotch-potch of furniture, objets and art, some of which I’ve dragged around since my student days. It is an eclectic mix to say the least, but each piece has a history or forms part of a story – my word for objects acting in concert – that is sometimes witty, often rude, always playful.
I am someone who abhors clutter and pretends to be disaffected by sentiment, so what the interior has become is something of a shock and a surprise to me. It is constantly changing and (I think) growing quieter. If I actually lived here it would be completely different.
For me, the essence of “holiday home” is a thing distinct from the space from where one works and nothing distinguishes this place more from my urban existence than its garden. A source of perpetual joy and frustration, I have been humbled by the time things take and that they fail as often as they flourish. Few things are as rewarding as a garden and watching mine grow is of constant enchantment to me.
Insects, birds and other animals complete this magical realm and over the years we have played host to baboons, snakes and spiders, tortoises and frogs, countless small birds, an owl, a falcon and a badger who took care of Eeny, Meeny, Miny and Mo (our goldfish).
The arum lilies are routinely raided by an enormous porcupine, and there is a guinea fowl we have named Narcissus who cannot pass our door without pecking lustily at his reflection in the glass. He is our morning wake-up call.
A colourful heritage
Ever since finding Friday I have been relishing the opportunity to be the first to say that Kleinmond is the Camps Bay of the Overberg. Home to pristine beaches, the second biggest estuary in the land (home to South Africa’s only wild wetland horses), and an extraordinary range of fynbos-covered mountains that stretches for miles, the town is an enclave bordered by these magnificent elements and urban sprawl is thus contained.
The area’s heritage is as dramatic as its setting – ancient as the 2 000-year-old Khoisan fish traps, or the runaway slaves – the “Drosters of Kleinmond” – who hung out at Drostersgat in the 1700s and possibly constitute the first organised crime unit in South Africa.
Recent history is equally colourful: when farmer Piet Rademeyer shot the last leopard in the Kogelberg, a local resident spray-painted onto Main Road “Save the leopard, shoot Rademeyer”.
Our house is crazy, off-beat, filled with memory and meaning. It is a spectacular place to entertain and a refuge, a time-out zone I guard resolutely, where unannounced visitors – unkindly dubbed The Knitting Club – and the ring of my cell phone are unwelcome.
It is where I will retire and where I steal long weekends; where I both escape from and embrace a community, and where my heart lies.
TGIF!
Ellis and Associates Architects, 021 422 2824
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