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A sense of nostalgia for the farm dams of his childhood served as inspiration for the round fresh-water pool, and the arrangement of colourful wooden lattices adds a playful, contemporary touch. -
A wonderful vintage cupboard found at a local antique store adds warmth to the kitchen, where a repurposed storm-water pipe is used, in lieu of traditional walls, to house the fuse box and electricity cables. The steel table is Roelof’s own design. -
The builder’s lintels used as paving in front of the house echo the corrugations of the galvanised steel roof. It’s a place to sit and watch an approaching thunderstorm or enjoy the spectacular Johannesburg sunsets. -
Colour film on some of the glass panels of the facade pay homage to the high modernism of Mondrian and the high-rise apartment buildings of Hillbrow, and evoke the intense colours of Johannesburg sunsets. -
The stark geometry of the guest quarters stands in wonderful contrast to the wild garden. -
The galvanized steel roof, which evokes the angles and colours of electricity pylons, facilitates the collection of rainwater runoff, which is stored in massive water tanks in the back yard. -
The arrangement of brightly coloured pots introduces curves to contrast with the straight lines and sharp angles of the containers, lintels, steel and glass used as building materials. -
A stairway leads down from the car entrance, marked by stacked containers that also serve as self-contained guest quarters. The wall of stone, sourced from a local quarry, completes the contemporary clash of colour and texture. -
Beautifully textured shale off-cuts are used as paving outside the entrance to the kitchen, echoing the colour of the slate tiles inside the house. -
Large lamps and modern furniture add colourful accents to the interior space. -
Certainly the most progressive part of the design is the energy efficiency of the entire space: The roof collects enough rainwater to last a year and houses a bank of batteries powered by solar panels. -
Because the owner is an avid art collector, the house also functions as a flexible gallery space in which pieces can be displayed and interchanged regularly. Rugs cover the black slate floors in spaces designated for specific purposes, like the lounge.
WORDS Bibi Slippers PRODUCTION Annemarie Meintjes PHOTOS Dook
Mondrian meets Parktown in the design of a glass box abode in Johannesburg, elevating the seemingly ugly into a thing of timeless beauty.
Where to begin writing about the space that architect-turned-ad-man-turned-artist Roelof Petrus van Wyk inhabits in Parktown, if you need to mention process, ping-pong, roast chicken and the passage of time?
It would have to be with a lesson in tenses – or a specific tense, to be exact: The present perfect progressive tense places emphasis on the course or duration of an action, and not so much on the result. It describes an action that recently stopped or is still continuing, or a completed action that influenced the present.
READ MORE: Prefabricated Bloemfontein Home
Take this sentence, for example: Roelof has been roasting chicken. (It is the house that made him do it: Part of the reason he commissioned architectural studio Thomashoff + Partner to design him a living space was to nudge himself, formerly an exceptionally undomesticated bachelor of the lock-up-and-go variety, into a headspace of greater investment and presence in the practicalities of daily life. “I didn’t know how to roast a chicken, or cook anything, for that matter. But living here has made me feel like I should… so I’ve been looking up Yotam Ottolenghi recipes online.”)
Roelof knows Karlien Thomashoff from their university days, and chose her for the project because, he says, “We think alike.” He describes the design process as a two-year-long game of ping-pong: “I’d throw an idea or a drawing out, and Karlien would hit back with a response to that idea or a different drawing, which I’d reinterpret again and so on and so forth.”
During their ping-pong process they questioned everything, from the use of lintels (cleverly used as paving) to ugly government-issue storm-water pipes (used in the interior of the house in lieu of walls – to stunning effect). The result is a house-cum-artist’s residency that consists of a main residential area – an open-plan glass box 42 m long and 5 m wide – as well as guest quarters created from repurposed shipping containers.
The space they created is present perfect progressive in the sense that it is, to some extent, designed to be unfinished. The design places emphasis on process: The space is flexible and can be reconfigured at the owner’s whim. Specific areas are defined by large rugs instead of walls, and hidden electrical plugs along the floor and overhead beams means lights, projectors or other functional equipment can turn the entertainment area into a concert hall or lecture room in an instant.
Roelof’s house is a blank space that begs for expression, but the careful combination of elements has also infused the design with a sense of heritage and history. “I wanted the design to encapsulate the past hundred years of history, everything from high modernism to high-rise apartment blocks in Hillbrow, from Mondrian’s De Stijl paintings to the mine dumps that are so typically Johannesburg.”
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