State of the art

PHOTOS Micky Hoyle PRODUCTION Ralph Weiden WORDS Chris Roper

Creative director and art consultant Ralph Weiden’s Atlantic-facing apartment exemplifies his elegantly composed decorating style.

The black sheep is the giveaway. By Cape Town artist Sanell Aggenbach, it stands curiously alongside the ultramodernist fireplace and leavens the sleek look of the apartment with a brave hint of the absurd. The sheep adds the human touch, if you will. Without it, you might be tempted to do owner Ralph Weiden’s aesthetic a disservice, and see only immaculate lines, precisely chosen fabrics and materials, and beautifully appropriate art. But with the help of the sheep, you can see a home.

Ralph’s apartment is situated at the top end of Sea Point’s Manichaean boulevard, Beach Road, which draws an asphalt swathe between good and bad. Good being the beauty of the sea on your right as you drive towards Bantry Bay, and bad being the mostly bland blocks of flats on your left.

Not everyone shares my opinion of Beach Road. Many see the creams and yellows of the buildings, flanked by shivering palm trees, as cutely Mediterranean. The fact that it’s actually the Atlantic Ocean you’re looking at is perhaps the point.

There’s no such continental drift in Ralph’s apartment. It’s very Cape Town, at least if you define Cape Town as stylish, cool and welcoming. That’s the way Ralph thinks of Cape Town, and one of the reasons why he loves it here and makes it his home from home when not in Germany.

“Here, you’re open to strangers. It’s so easy to meet new people, and people from other parts of Africa. And there’s the same creativity in Cape Town that you get in other big cities. And people here make an effort to do things, like start new businesses. Often they don’t know anything about business, but they just up and start one.”

The apartment is full of local art, paintings leaning higgledy-piggledy against a wall, sculptures dominating floor space, and other objects Ralph’s been collecting for 25 years. He’s also started making art himself, such as the large bronze cube that stands on the floor of the reading room, complementing a piece by Arlene Amaler-Raviv.

Civilised decor framed by unpredictable weather

When you climb the circular staircase tucked just inside the entrance, you encounter the real marvel of the apartment. You exit the apartment onto the roof – now a warm glass house, complete with comfortable seating. The roof area is large, providing the most amazing view of Sea Point, Signal Hill and the Atlantic. In one corner, on a raised dais, is a Jacuzzi, that ultimate symbol of Sea Point decadence.

The day I’m there is not calculated to show the rooftop off to its full effect. It’s a black southeaster (the Cape’s delightful in-joke), it’s raining, and when you peer over the side of the building, you look down on bedraggled seagulls fighting to make headway through the blustery wind. This is the old struggle between the Atlantic climate and Mediterranean aspirations. But it’s still a marvellous place to be, snug in the glass house looking out at the clouds scudding by.

One of the things that Ralph likes most about Cape Town is the fact that he can leave his apartment, jump into one of the 1960s cars that he’s collected over the years and, in his own words, “just drift through the day”. Winter, he says, is one of the undiscovered secrets of the Cape, a time when “a really nice red wine makes sense. And naturally summer is just a dream”.

It’s a sentiment that a visitor to the apartment will share, as the long windows in the lounge, and indeed the glass house on the roof, are designed to embrace the weather – whatever it may be – rather than disguise it. Maybe the dichotomy that is the seaside town of Sea Point starts to make more sense in a place like this. Civilised decor is framed by unpredictable weather, resulting in a living space that seems to belong to its environment instead of dictating to it.

Ralph Weiden weidenr@aol.com

First published in VISI 2006. See more of our favourite beach houses online and buy the Endless Summer edition of VISI for the ultimate beach house collection.