Steyn City: Where Outdoor Life Influences Interior Style

WORDS Graham Wood

Interior designer Amanda Elliott not only lives in Steyn City herself, but has also been central to conceptualising interior design projects for the luxury residential lifestyle estate since its inception. She shares how Steyn City’s world-class resort living and the ways in which it has influenced how she lives and approaches interior design.

Steyn City’s pioneering luxury resort lifestyle introduced something altogether new to the Gauteng urban landscape. Every convenience has been catered for within the estate’s secure environment, with the ultimate aim of taking back the time residents might have spent commuting and returning it to them as an opportunity to slow down and focus on family, community and the things that really matter.  

Steyn City’s flagship apartment hub, City Centre, has created the ultimate urban neighbourhood with all the convenience of a secure, high-tech, maintenance-free lifestyle and the charm of an old-city environment. City Centre was conceptualised as a contemporary pedestrianised hill town with cobbled streets, piazzas and parks, and has a 2 000-bay parking basement and 18 lift cores, each with a concierge, for the ultimate in lock-up-and-go convenience. The apartments in City Centre all boast views of the treed piazzas, a powerful connection to Steyn City’s beautifully manicured parkland.

An approach to interior design

Interior designer Amanda Elliott of Design Collective, which she established and runs with her husband, Matthew Fogg, has been intimately involved in the development of Steyn City over the past decade. Amanda has also worked on diverse projects in destinations as varied as the Indian Ocean Islands, United Kingdom, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan, Seychelles, Egypt and India.

“We’re really proud to have been part of Steyn City from the beginning,” says Amanda. “Douw [Steyn] and Giuseppe  [Plumari]’s vision to create a city like none other is incredible, and it’s been a privilege to watch this beautiful place develop and grow.” (Steyn and Plumari are the visionaries behind Steyn City’s pioneering approach to luxury estate living.)  

From the very earliest phases, Amanda was commissioned to design interiors for Steyn City’s launch show village, including the Oasis apartments and Origin cluster village, bringing to life the macro vision on the scale of an individual home. More recently, Amanda was commissioned once again to design interiors for a three-bedroom double-storey apartment in City Centre.  She has also designed the interiors of several freestanding homes for private clients.

A new way of living

Amanda’s background in hospitality design has proven to be highly informative given Steyn City’s resort lifestyle. Her approach involves creating a unique narrative for each interior that unlocks a way of living.

Fundamental to her understanding for the new project was appreciating how each residence in Steyn City is designed to embrace the outdoors. “The way the homes from apartments, clusters and freehold properties in Steyn City were built without walls or boundaries,” she says, “means they were designed to really enjoy the outside spaces.”

“It’s incredible to have an urban hub surrounded by nature,” says Amanda of City Centre and how it inspired her vision of her first double storey show apartment as a “garden sanctuary”. She brought in indoor plants and botanical motifs, “beautiful timbers, lovely marbles and little pops of green and soft contemporary florals”.

“We used beautiful textures and tone-on-tone colours to represent what was outside,” she says. The vista remained the hero and the focus was the setting. “You walk in from the entrance, and it just opens up ‒ there’s no barrier between you and the landscaping.” Amanda emphasised this sense of the outside coming in with what she describes as “beautiful billowing drapes”.

Perhaps more profoundly, however, Amanda notes the shift in mindset that City Centre lifestyle engendered. “You’re never confined to your apartment,” she says. “You’re essentially living outdoors.” Whether residents are enjoying the offerings in City Centre itself ‒ the piazza, central park, coffee shop, restaurant, gallery and the like ‒ or connecting with the walks, runs, cycle trails and myriad other outdoor leisure offerings at large, there’s a sense of freedom and ease that translates into the interior design.

In one freestanding home, instead of designing “rooms”, she conceptualised “suites”, almost as if it were a boutique hotel. The incredible freedom that Steyn City allows ‒ the openness, the time spent in communal places ‒ means that one approach to one’s home can be freer, with greater emphasis on leisure than utility.

“Because there is so little precedent for this parkland lifestyle, there are endless possibilities,” says Amanda. “One client has embraced Parisian glamour and another New York industrial aesthetics. Yet they all, as Amanda puts it, embrace “the security and the freedom and the versatility” of Steyn City, expressing its visionary lifestyle through new possibilities in interior design. 

Amanda and Matthew’s work continues to be showcased as the development progresses, highlighting their significant contributions to the project’s spaces.

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