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The study is one of two rooms at the front of the house. The fireplace was stripped by the former owner, but friends of the Wolffs found them a second-hand one in Robertson to replace it. -
When they set out to design the space, Ilze and Heinrich were aiming for a relevant and contemporary style that accommodates living. There are no painfully clean lines that would look terrible if things aren’t perfectly neat. -
The Wolffs didn’t buy any furniture for their new home: It’s all family heirlooms and hand-me-downs. They both abhor pretentiousness, insisting on authenticity and honesty in their design and decor. -
The yellow staircase leading up to the Wolffs’ bedroom does not connect to the outside wall, leaving a gap for light to pass through from the large windows on the upper level. -
The Wolffs created a sense of drama inside the house using paint and plaster. By articulating the periphery with red paint, they have managed to make the space look larger than it is. -
The Wolffs designed the double bunk beds in the boys’ bedroom themselves. Oscar and Samuel sleep on the bottom bunks, and the top bunks offer ample space for play or for friends to sleep over. -
The Wolffs lowered the original ceiling of the Victorian house to create the extra space needed to accommodate their bedroom and upstairs bathroom. The simple bath is stylish without being pretentious -
The main bedroom is filled with light when the shutters are open, but when the shutters are closed it becomes completely dark – exactly the way Ilze and Heinrich like it. -
Ilze and Samuel sit on the concrete stairs leading down to the living room, which is below the floor level of the original Victorian house.
PHOTOS Micky Hoyle PRODUCTION Sumien Brink WORDS Bibi Slippers
Husband-and-wife team Heinrich and Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects redesigned an old Victorian house in Cape Town to reflect their idea of an unpretentious and liveable home.
“We were looking for a dump, and this was it.” Award-winning architect Heinrich Wolff begins the tale of how he and wife Ilze turned a decrepit hovel of a Victorian house into a contemporary home with a laugh. “The former owner was a narcotics user who stripped the house bare. It was in such a state it wasn’t even on the estate agent’s list, but it was exactly what we wanted: an empty shell,” Ilze adds.
They knew this was “their house” once they’d seen the light quality in and the view of Devil’s Peak from the front room. “It was a glowing moment in our search,” Ilze says. “We had seen so many buildings, but it didn’t make sense for us to pay for someone else’s expensive renovations that didn’t reflect our design ethos.”
Ilze and Heinrich both liked the fact that Victorian architecture is based around rooms, and decided to restore the front end of the house to its former glory. They added a wholly contemporary space to the back of this. “It’s this idea of grafting,” Heinrich says. “We wanted to show the younger generation’s capacity to reimagine our received culture. Because our culture carries baggage, we have to transform it into something that’s our own.”
Ilze says they were inspired by restoration work done by architects in Brazil. “They don’t just faithfully restore; they really add their own values to the space.”
They conceived the new addition to the house around the concept of a red cube, craftily divided into a kitchen, living room and open courtyard. A concrete slab supports the main bedroom and bathroom upstairs.
Ilze and Heinrich built the house themselves, resulting in some interesting challenges. “We hung the roof by its bootstraps and built the slab underneath it. We rebuilt some of the walls that carried the ceiling – so we kept historical things above and built new things below. Physically keeping the roof in the air was hard!”
At first they had no intention of building themselves, but extremely high quotes from builders drove them to take up the task. “We asked Gwen and Gawie Fagan for advice, because they also did their own house. They both agreed they’d do it all over again if they had the chance, but Gwen said if we wanted to give ourselves a real deadline, we should have children at the same time,” Ilze remembers.
They managed to finish the project before populating the front room with two boys. “It was going to be our work room and studio,” Ilze muses with a smile, “but things change.”
And if they could do it again, would they change anything? Heinrich: “We probably could have made it smaller. We sit very far from the TV.”
Ilze: “I still don’t know why we have two basins in our bathroom.”
“We were trying to elevate ourselves out of the middle class,” Heinrich says, laughing, aptly ending the story the way it began.
