COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Gerner Ekaterina; Nicolas Mathéus; Paris Brummer; Alberto Strada; Dook
From soft pinks and cool blues to delicate greens, pops of these gentle hues create spaces that feel both welcoming and refined.
These local and international homes from the VISI Archives let pastel tones take centre stage.
New York Apartment
The owners of the apartment entrusted Reutov Design with an unconventional approach. The result? An inner-city vacation haven that serves to help its inhabitants forget the stress of everyday life. Terracotta-pink walls meet pastel blues and fifty shades of green; colours that paint spaces with the smell of flowers and scenes of a holiday spent below the border.
The variety of natural green shades makes for an ultra-modern interior that is at once visually striking and calming. Taking cues from the textures and colours typical of Mexican architecture, deserts and cacti fields, the apartment is a reflection of nature’s hand in design: organic and unpredictable.
Read the full story on this New York apartment.
Paris Apartment
It’s an apartment of strong ideas – and one totally appropriate to its sought-after location: Paris’s 10th arrondissement has long had strong links with the performing arts in a tradition that dates back to the 18th century.
With this in mind, architects Dev Gupta, Olivia Charpentier and Alexandre Goulet of GCG have combined colour and specific finishing details to create a space that revolves around the apartment’s beautiful reception room. “We have worked this space with a theatre-opera inspiration that’s reflected in the interplay of mezzanines and balconies,” they say. “The flow revolves around the central space, which offers fleeting views and perspectives of the other rooms.”
Indeed, bathed in sunlight, the living room is the centrepiece of this beautiful design. It benefits from a triple volume animated by vertical and horizontal flows, varied diagonal views to the other spaces of the triplex, structural elements softened by plaster curves, and built-in joinery in organic shapes.
Read the full story on this Paris apartment.
Parkwood House
After years spent living in rented properties around the world while continent-hopping for work purposes, Wanita Seekins, her husband, Stephen, and their three daughters returned to South Africa six years ago to settle down. Parkwood was not a suburb on their radar at the time. “The lease on our rental was almost up, and we had been looking for a house to buy for a while,” says Wanita. “It was by pure chance that we happened to see an ad for what is now our home, as we weren’t looking in the area. There was something about the property that captivated us, and when we went to view it, it was the jacaranda-lined road and the number of bedrooms [five] that sealed the deal. It was just what we needed as a family, and more particularly for our daughters, each of whom wanted a bedroom of her own.”
While the house ticked many boxes, aesthetically it was lacking – and, as is often the case, what the family initially thought could be fixed cosmetically turned into a full-blown renovation. “Fortunately for us, my mother Astrid van der Heim has been in the building and interior- decorating world for many years, so she led the project,” says Wanita. “Due to our occupation date, it was an intense three months of chopping, building, gutting kitchens and bathrooms, and starting over. We needed to get the ‘bones’ of the house right; the rest we slowly updated and perfected over time.”
Read the full story on the Parkwood house.
Minimalist Italian Apartment
This contemporary refurbished apartment, nestled within the confines of a 1960s apartment building, pays homage to the artisanal traditions of the past and places a strong emphasis on the use of materials, making them the focal point of its design.
This is no ordinary space – ATOMAA deliberately shunned the idea of ‘traditional’ rooms and corridors by creating a series of intimate interlocking areas that lie concealed behind functional surfaces.
In the open-plan kitchen, the island and sideboard in a rich, wine-red hue discreetly conceals a wide array of culinary tools, while sand-coloured wooden panels hide the sink and shelves. Every surface in this space tells a story of connection and human touch. “The embossed lacquers offer a velvet-like texture under your fingertips, narrating the moment when sand and colour harmoniously blended. The elm’s grain that envelops the kitchen transports us to the thoughtful selection of slabs artfully juxtaposed. Meanwhile, the cool and impeccably smooth concrete countertops mirror the painstaking effort of those who polished them,” says ATOMAA.
Read the full story on this minimalist Italian apartment.
Fish Hoek House
As many couples did during the pandemic, Lauren Shantall and her husband Derek Eyden re-evaluated their lifestyle. To beat the claustrophobia of their new work-from-home regimen, Lauren, who runs her own PR company, and musician Derek would regularly pile into the car with their 13-year-old son Daniel, and make the trek from Rosebank in the heart of Cape Town’s suburbia to the Deep South – the colloquial name used for the slack-paced string of suburbs that hug the Cape Peninsula’s coastline. “We were waking up three, four times a week to go for sunrise swims,” says Lauren. “Covid meant that I suddenly lost 40% of my business – but it also meant that I could work from anywhere. We realised we could minimise our petrol bill and just move to live next to the ocean!”
The Mid-century Prairie-style house the couple ended up buying in Fish Hoek wasn’t exactly their architectural dream, but its lofty location against the mountain, with a view of both the Atlantic and Indian oceans, was. “It was one of those 1960s box houses, where you open the front door and walk into a rectangle,” says Lauren. “Derek and I knew roughly what we wanted to do. We measured the space, made little scale drawings and cut out pieces of furniture that we’d move around, trying endless configurations.”
Read the full story on this Fish Hoek house.
Sea Point Apartments
Situated in the middle of Fresnaye and the Sea Point Promenade, and wedged between a combination of dated flats, same- same modern apartment blocks and an excess of commercial entities, is The Flamingo. As with all structures designed by architects extraordinaire Robert Silke & Partners, nothing about this building is ordinary. Known for his love of Art Deco, Modernism and PoMo, Robert refers to The Flamingo’s aesthetic as “Bauhaus on heat”. Unlike the uninspired steel-and-glass high-rises infiltrating Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard and CBD, The Flamingo – similar to the architecture studio’s Tuynhuys apartments in the city centre and Anew Hotel in Green Point – is a breath of fresh air, with curved white walls, black accents and a spectacular glass-bricked eight-floor stairwell that makes you want to up your step count rather than take the soundless and speedy lift.
Commissioned by Signatura, with whom Robert has worked before, the brief was to create something compact and fun. “They came to us because they’re familiar with our work, and they knew we would give them something completely different from what is generally built in this area,” he says. “The development’s main goal was to be able to offer modern, exciting, fully self-catering micro-apartments, predominantly for holiday rentals and the Airbnb market.”
Read the full story on this Sea Point apartments.
Avant-Garde Parisian Duplex
Sign up any interior design firm that cites Dadaism as its primary influence, and you are pretty much guaranteed something a little left of centre. The early 20th century avant-garde art movement was born out of a response to the savagery of World War I, with its proponents questioning every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art.
The Dadaists fervently crumpled up traditional values and launched a three-pointer into the bin. So a brave choice, then, for the owner of this Parisian duplex to hire Thomas Dariel and Maison Dada. On the plus side, Delphine Moreau did have some insider info on her choice of interior designer – she’s a partner in the business. And that means that playful and quirky forms, as well as contrasting colour combinations, were always on the cards.
Founded in 2016, Maison Dada was based on a wild dream to inject a dose of Dadaism into everyday life, creating furniture, lighting and decorative accessories in what they saw as the realm that bridged dreams and reality. In the words of Monsieur Dariel, “Dadaism is the foundation of contemporary design, contemporary art and a contemporary way of thinking. Dada is a state of mind. That freedom is part of my signature. Maison Dada’s collection is a reflection of that – of an unrestrained imagination that brings life to objects.”
Read the full story on this Avant-Garde Parisian duplex.
Art Deco Cape Town Apartment
There simply isn’t a better view in Cape Town than the outlook from a Holyrood apartment on a summer evening. Sorry, denizens of the Atlantic Seaboard and devotees of Boyes Drive. Apologies, everyone in Bloubergstrand and Bishopscourt. But if you one day stand on a curvy, postage-stamp-sized balcony at this, one of the Mother City’s best-known buildings, you’ll understand. Set out directly below you is the Company’s Gardens, green and verdant, with its blend of landscaped formality and whimsically wandering humans. Beyond that to the left is downtown Cape Town and its various unfortunate high rises – and then to the right, the dramatic sweep of the City Bowl and the face of Table Mountain.
But the view is just one of the many reasons why you might want to live in Holyrood. As one of the few Cape Town buildings that can properly be called “iconic”, this narrow Art Deco apartment block is instantly recognisable and very beautiful. Plus, it’s also always attracted what one of its best-known current residents, architect Robert Silke, broadly describes as “outcasts and eccentrics”, among whom this maverick designer would undoubtedly include himself.
Read the full story on this Art Deco Cape Town apartment.
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