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Brick ramps, such as the one leading guests to the fire-engine-red front door, have replaced stairs in this Modernist residence. -
Architect Adèle Naudé Santos designed the house to maximise the small plot of land, making it a residence to be enjoyed from the inside out. -
The building is a celebration of its materials – unplastered brickwork, glass and steel. -
A spartan slate courtyard neatly frames the designer Mid-century furnishings inside. -
Each bedroom in the house looks out onto its own private garden. -
The lounge is a showroom of designer Mid-century Modern furniture, like the Le Bambole sofa by Mario Bellini. -
An Eero Aarnio Bubble chair dangling in one corner of the lounge makes for a seductive reading nook. -
A 1950s Kai Kristiansen desk, Charles Eames side chair from Herman Miller and orange Spun lamp by Sebastian Wrong for Flos: working from home has never looked this good. On the coffee table is a Zig-Zag light by Shui Chan. -
The refurbished kitchen’s vivid shades of teal, yellow and green are a nod to Mid-century Modernism, but still feel contemporary. -
Adèle incorporated skylights to illuminate the original owners’ (her parents) art collection – half a century later, they illuminate the collection of the new owner, Marco Chiandetti, including his own sculpture. -
Brickwork ramps radiate towards the bedrooms from the open-plan living area. -
Marco updated the existing hallway cabinets with new doors in Mid-century- inspired hues. -
The floor plan boasts a dynamic interplay between curved and straight lines, as seen here in the main bedroom. -
Form meets function in the hallway cabinets, which also serve as plinths for collaborative concrete works by Marco and Melora Kuhn. -
A bespoke mural of fun retro stripes is the undisputed crowning glory of the main en suite bathroom. -
An unapologetically orange carpet lands the main bedroom right in the ’70s.
WORDS Annette Klinger PRODUCTION Mark Serra PHOTOS Paris Brummer
An award-winning mid-century house by world-renowned South African-born architect Adèle Naudé Santos has been restored to its former glory thanks to three years of doggedly determined work by its new owner.
“You know, I counted every single brick in this house,” says architect Adèle Naudé Santos, smiling, as she stands looking around the main bedroom of the first house she ever designed – a solid Modernist four-bedroomer completed in 1967 and situated in a narrow, leafy avenue in Cape Town’s Kenilworth.
She may not actually be joking. Their modular layout, visible through the unplastered whitewashed walls, means you could conceivably measure the dimensions of the house brick by brick. US-based Adèle may now be a world-renowned architect, but back then she was just starting her career, and this was her first-ever build. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough, the client was her father, the late architect Hugo Naudé.
“My father didn’t want me to become an architect because he didn’t believe it was a woman’s profession,” says Adèle. “When I graduated top of my class in my third year at UCT, he told me it was time to move on – so I went to London to complete my degree at the Architectural Association.”
Conspicuously different from its neighbouring properties, the house’s facade is hidden from street view. “The house was designed to be experienced from the inside outwards,” says Adèle. “My parents wanted a lot of privacy, so they asked for the bedrooms to feel like their own houses within the house. Each has its own private garden, and doesn’t look out onto any other part of the house.”
Standing next to Adèle – who had flown into Cape Town just the day before from the US – is the home’s new owner, Italian-British sculptor Marco Chiandetti. When Marco first saw the inside of the house three years earlier, the self-admitted Mid-century Modern fanboy realised he was being presented with a rare real-estate opportunity (25 years of accumulated clutter and ill-advised building extensions by the previous owners notwithstanding). “Everything had been painted with a white gloss paint, and there was carpeting everywhere,” he recalls. “But it was just one of those situations where I was like, wow, a property of this calibre doesn’t come on the market very often. And so I bent over backwards to get it.”
Marco’s artistic sensibility and knowledge of Modernist design meant that he had a reasonably accurate instinct about what needed to be done to restore the house back to its original glory – but there were a few gaps. “Through the joys of the internet, I found out that Adèle lived in Boston, where she was the dean of architecture at MIT.” Marco reached out to Adèle, and she sent him scans of the original blueprints and a collection of personal photographs of the home’s interior, taken when her parents resided there. Marco describes the restoration process as a systematic stripping back of layers until the house revealed itself as it was intended to be. “It was a bit like an archaeological excavation, really,” he says. He did the lion’s share of the work himself, most of it during the pandemic.
The only real renovation that took place was the modernisation of the kitchen and bathrooms, to which Marco introduced bespoke cupboards and cabinetry in vivid shades of teal, green, orange and yellow that landed it firmly in the mid-century. “I tried not to introduce materials that you wouldn’t have found in the 1960s, but I didn’t want the house to become a museum, either,” he says. “I tried to gauge the tone of the era while still giving it the flavour that it needed.”
And so the day finally came for Marco to give Adèle the grand tour. In every room, there was one feature or another that she’d pause at to reminisce: the little corner window her father liked to look out of when he was seated in his favourite chair; the skylights that were specially incorporated to illuminate Hugo’s collection of paintings by his uncle, the famous Impressionist also called Hugo Naudé; and, yes, the brickwork that she had so fastidiously overseen during the build that launched her career.
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