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The path leading to the front door draws you in with ribbon-like rammed- earth walls, marking the beginning of a journey through and around the house. Architect Guy Trangos refers to it as a “rising sun gate”. -
The path leading to the front door draws you in with ribbon-like rammed- earth walls, marking the beginning of a journey through and around the house. Architect Guy Trangos refers to it as a “rising sun gate”. -
The entrance hall with its low concrete ceiling “compresses” the space, offering a glimpse of the central courtyard, while a curved wall invites you inside. -
The main living area includes a kitchen with a kitchen island, a dining table, and a lounge with a fireplace. The engineered timber floors by Oggie and sleek, refined fittings help articulate the raw elemental concrete and rammed earth. Circular shapes, such as the ceiling, appear as a leitmotif throughout the house. -
The sitting area has a wide, cinematic view of the front garden, anchored by a giant pin oak. -
A low folly wall in the front garden picks up on an axis that runs through the design. -
The skylit passage from the front door slopes downwards, creating a sense of release as you move towards the bedroom wing. -
One of two studio spaces that can one day be converted into bedrooms if needed. -
The bedroom wing in the lower part of the house gives the rooms a secure, grounded feeling as they look up and out into the central courtyard garden. -
At the centre of the house is an open courtyard with a garden by Tim Steyn Landscaping and a circular swimming pool. The curved rammed-earth wall catches the light that travels across the courtyard throughout the day, expressing the passage of time. -
The curving, ribbon-like walls create a sense of movement, of paths, of ways through and openings rather than bounded space with a clearly defined “inside” and “outside”. -
The curving, ribbon-like walls create a sense of movement, of paths, of ways through and openings rather than bounded space with a clearly defined “inside” and “outside”. -
A second studio is bathed in soft light from a clerestory window. -
The studio also opens to a sloping garden courtyard to the north. -
In the skylit bathrooms, terrazzo tiles, concrete blocks and sleek fittings result in a sense of calm and tranquillity. -
The contrast between the raw rammed earth and refined cabinetry, beautifully illuminated by natural light, creates an almost spiritual atmosphere. -
In the bedroom wing, the windows that look out onto the courtyard can slide away, opening to the garden and pool. Their sunken position immerses you in the landscape, where birds, bees and butterflies animate the garden.
WORDS Graham Wood PRODUCTION Klara van Wyngaarden PHOTOS Sarah de Pina
This spiralling rammed-earth home on the Highveld is the result of a forward-thinking design approach that met a brief more philosophical than specific.
“We want something inspired” was the brief given to architects Catherine de Souza and Guy Trangos of Meshworks Architecture + Urbanism by the owners of this Johannesburg home. “We need newness… the kind of architecture that would look forward, not back.” When describing what they hoped for, the owners spoke not of rooms but of a “meander” or a “journey”.
For Guy and Catherine, it was the realisation that to meet the brief, they’d need to test what it meant to build a new house in Johannesburg. The design began as a series of pathways – “ways through” rather than boundaries. A series of rammed-earth walls spiral inwards, as Guy puts it, “directing energies, flows and people away from the edge, and through.” At the centre is a wild garden courtyard and a circular pool.
The architects have clearly thought about how the ribbon-like walls would catch the sun, and how the rays would travel along them, articulating not just shape, but movement and time itself. Catherine describes the walls as “going way past where they need to”. As a result, the interiors use glass to close off the spaces between the freestanding walls, holding them as “delicately”as possible. “We never puncture the walls with windows,”she explains.With the exception of a giant porthole near the entrance, “We always stop the wall, insert a window, and then the wall continues. Or we put windows between parallel walls.”
There’s a sense of discovery and surprise as you travel through the house. The site slopes, so, as much as the rammed-earth walls seem to rise from beneath the ground, the pathways seem to descend, as if you were entering a canyon. This gives the bedroom wing at the back a grounded, reassuring earthiness, and the living area an open, almost cinematic view of the front garden. There are no steps, so the entire home is navigable by wheelchair. The central courtyard feels like a planetarium, according to the owners. It turns the sky into a dome that holds fleeting images of light, cloud and flocks of birds.
Counterbalancing the flowing rammed-earth walls are elements of a super-structured Cartesian grid expressed in exposed blockwork. Rammed earth is the kind of material that, as the owners put it, speaks for itself. They talk about it almost as a living thing. The walls are “like skin”. They “have dimples”. It bears, says Catherine, the marks of its making – “an honest memory of how this house was built”. The architects think of rammed earth as a material that gives. It soaks up the sun’s warmth and releases it at night, and it has a wonderful acoustic quality.
The window- and doorframes, lights, cabinets and other details are sleek, precise and refined to offset the rawness of the rammed earth. The choice of unembellished materials intensifies the poetry of the spaces. It has been welcoming to their accumulations, too; it’s not the kind of house that rejects the things you love.
They compare living here to inhabiting a sanctuary, of beauty, peace and wonderment. And yet, it connects to its place. The way it weaves together earth and light heightens your awareness of the Highveld’s distinctive atmosphere and climate. It couldn’t be anywhere else. Even more than that, says one of the owners, “I’m much more aware of my physicality here.”
The house, for them, has revitalised body, mind and spirit. It is a personal and an architectural renewal. | meshworks.archi
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