COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Dook; Adam Letch; Paris Brummer; Elsa Young; Jan Ras; Warren Heath; Nudge Studio

From bold façades to intricate screen walls, these textured face brick and breeze block builds blend modern aesthetics with timeless construction materials.

Contemporary Johannesburg Home

Arrive at this house for the first time, and it is difficult not to have your curiosity piqued by the monolithic façade of clay brick pavers set behind a pink right-angled triangle. Bold and unapologetic of its avant-garde grandeur, it provides an inkling of an entrance. “We’ve nicknamed this house the ‘shape-sorter house’,” says architect Gregory Katz. “Our conceptual journey began with the idea of a cube as an envelope.” Behind this elaborate geometric structure sits an unassuming constricted stretch of entryway leading to an understated front door. Step through it and you’re welcomed into a bright, spacious and airy home flooded with natural light.

Gregory describes the play of light created by the asymmetric windows as the gift that keeps on giving. The space is open and barrier-free, with each area flowing seamlessly into the next. Natural light sweeps through two stately half-moon cutouts on the ground floor. These wide half-cylinder openings frame views of the entire garden, breaking the barrier between indoors and outdoors. Much like the assertive façade, the interior boasts its own kind of confidence. It is a consciously eclectic mix of brightly coloured shapes, with a clean and minimalist aesthetic that serves as a canvas to showcase the homeowners’ green thumb and quirky art collection.

Read the full story on this contemporary Johannesburg home.

Contemporary Rondebosch Home

Rondebosch, a Cape Town suburb with a distinctly colonial air, is not the neighbourhood one would expect to find cutting-edge architectural design, so the first glimpse of this ultramodern structure comes as something of a surprise.

Designed for a young family, the house offers relaxed living and is ideally suited to the South African indoor-outdoor lifestyle. In a nod to decades-old construction elements used extensively in the area, the architects used standard precast concrete breeze blocks in the construction of a striking screen wall that acts as the “face” of the dwelling.

“It allows light to permeate while providing privacy and dappled light to the guest wing and terrace,” say the Three14 Architects design team of Kim Benatar, Sian Fisher and Miles Appelgryn. “The client’s brief called for a contemporary, open-plan home that offers a relaxed lifestyle and takes advantage of the site and the views.” The design ticks all those boxes and more.

Read the full story on this contemporary Rondebosch home.

Somerset West Church

When an existing church in the winelands of Somerset West became too small for its growing congregation, architect Jo Noero created an extraordinary new space. “As the new church needed to expand and contract easily to accommodate 450 to 900 people depending on the occasion, we converted the original church into a hall and performance space and built a new one approximately 25 metres away,” Jo says. A grassed courtyard links the two buildings – now converted into a hall and performance space – while the covered colonnade provides access to all spaces from the entrance gate.

Working closely with the minister, Gavin Millard, who trained as an architect before entering the ministry, Jo conceptualised a circular inner “drum”, large enough to accommodate 450 people. To incorporate the additional Christ Church congregation, a roofed square space fans out from the main circle, like a generous skirt. The dramatic vertical dimension of this circular space means the minister is never more than 15 metres from anyone in the audience.

Read the full story on this Somerset West Church.

Modernist Durban Home

On first encounter, House Shaw is brutally simple: a series of three-dimensional boxes, positioned beside and on top of one another on a long, triangular site cut into one of the steep slopes that characterise Durban’s forested university suburb. It is made of face brick, concrete, louvre windows, shutters and a bit of aluminium; no need for paint, wallpaper, air conditioning – not even curtains.

The house belongs to Colleen Wygers, who lived here with her late husband, fellow architect Paul Wygers. Sadly, Paul passed away shortly after we photographed the house; with Colleen’s permission, we’ve included his observations from that interview.

Paul liked to describe the home as Modernism morphing the heritage Durban veranda home – and, when it went onto the market in 2013, the couple bought it within hours of their first viewing. Designed by Hallen and Dibb Architects in the 1960s, it had been commissioned by legal luminary Douglas Shaw. “Douglas Shaw was sitting in an Eames chair in the lounge,” recalled Paul. “We chatted briefly about art and architecture. I don’t think he wanted to leave.”

Read the full story on this modernist Durban home.

Greenside Home

It takes a good eye to spot potential in a fixer-upper, particularly in a city like Johannesburg. There are some real gems – almost always undervalued – but their qualities are often lost beneath the add-ons that barnacle their way onto houses over time. Christo Vermeulen and Nico Venter are serial renovators. Inevitably, after a few years of living in a house, they find their eyes wandering.

They most certainly do have a knack for recognising the signs that something special might be lurking beneath the surface a nondescript exterior. Christo is a former textile designer turned builder/renovator – with a sideline in manufacturing bespoke features, especially metalwork and ironmongery – and Nico is an urban designer with an interest in the city’s architectural history. Together, they make a formidable team: insightful and capable, with the perfect combination of vision and respect for the innate qualities of a good find.

Read the full story on this Greenside home.

Pinelands Home

There’s a certain witchiness to Robert Silke‘s new family home in the Cape Town suburb of Pinelands. A darkly dramatic front gate framed by a brick archway reading Caverswall opens onto a narrow garden path, which leads you to a house that’s equal parts imposing and intriguing, with a steeply pitched, clay-tiled roof, spiral chimneys and brickwork finish – all in the same burnt-honey shade. “It’s basically a gingerbread house, right?” says Robert, taking in the facade of the 1938 Arts and Crafts Revival structure he shares with partner Gideon and their one-year-old daughter Lilith.

“Pinelands was established in the 1920s, when there was a big push around the world for an approximation of English country living,” says Robert. “There was a planner in the UK called Ebenezer Howard, who invented the suburb, which he originally called a garden city. The idea gained global traction in reaction to the Spanish flu – people felt that the way they lived in cities wasn’t healthy. Pinelands was actually the third garden city in the world.”

Read the full story on this Pinelands home.

Johannesburg House

What Toni Twidale wanted even more than a house was to live among the trees. “I wanted to see green all the time,” says Toni, who owns this home with her partner Graeme. “I wanted the outside in.” And so they decided to build a house that would, more than anything, be about the site.

The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, known locally for his creative, experimental and often unconventional approach. Toni wanted to keep all the indigenous trees; Gregory’s brief, therefore, became something of a mathematical puzzle around fitting the dimensions of a house between the trees. In the end, he settled on two long, slim “bars”, with alternating strips of open space on either side and between them for the driveway, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an “umbilical cord” – a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site. The branches of the trees reach up and over a flat concrete roof, which is planted with wavy grass, essentially lifting what would have been on the ground up a level, and adding to the greenery.

Read the full story on this Johannesburg house.

Vredehoek Home

When Robyn and Clinton Campbell took the plunge and bought their first stand-alone property in Cape Town’s Vredehoek four years ago, they settled on 235m² with an existing house on it. Their initial plan was to keep some of the original house and go up by way of a major renovation, but that was thwarted when the foundations were found to be wanting.

Having to get their heads around a full demolition, the couple fortunately had a friend in architect Michael Lumby of ML-A, whose bold and honest use of materials was an aesthetic they both loved. “Our brief was pretty open,” says Clinton, “but budget was a major consideration, and we knew that the challenge would be to find simple and cost-effective solutions that wouldn’t compromise the creative vision.”

Known for his contextual cleverness and innovative approach to well-planned, efficient spaces, Michael came up with a design of unexpectedly generous spaces for such a small home. “My idea was to step the house down in sync with the slope, thus allowing the spaces to open up as you move through it,” he explains.

Read the full story on this Vredehoek home.

House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys

In a private reserve in the Waterberg, three hours north of Johannesburg, a series of buildings crouches camouflaged in a forest. You’d struggle to see them among the dense foliage, even from above. Two of those buildings – House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys – constitute the home of a pair of veterinary scientists, a husband and wife whose passion for nature and the great outdoors drew them to this wild corner of the country.

Owing to its location on a 5 000-hectare farm-turned nature reserve, it’s not uncommon to see giraffe, leopard or genet, and an abundance of birds, from the paradise flycatcher to the yellow-bellied greenbul. It was during a ramble here that the owners came across a sandstone promontory that plunges into the riverine forest below, and decided that this very spot was to be their home.

As if contending with a steep gradient in a forest in the middle of the bushveld wasn’t enough to challenge their architect, their brief to him was “simply” to construct a tree house, without removing a single tree from the site. The young architect, who collaborates with a host of brilliant minds under the collective pseudonym Frankie Pappas, had the site Lidar-scanned to map the all-important trees.

Read the full story on this Waterberg Home.

Calling Academy

Located on a bucolic plot bordering Polkadraai Road between Stellenbosch and Kuilsriver, the site was allocated by the previous generation of surrounding landowners to serve the local farming community and originally comprised six existing classrooms, a reception and sports field.

An annual increase in grade intakes compounded by a matrix of constrictions required SALT Architects to implement a fluxive, organic design process that simultaneously maximises the quality of the learning environment and centres the natural beauty of the site, at the lowest possible cost. The guiding principle is the prioritisation of quality education over the cost of facilities.

Read the full story on the Calling Academy.

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The post 10 Bold South African Builds Featuring Brick appeared first on Visi.

Ever wondered who inspired our current generation of architects? For one of the founders of design collective Frankie Pappas, the muse makes itself known in everything from Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips to the Euclidean Geometry in the work of local architect Jo Noero.

Ant thinks Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is really bad architecture. There, he’s said it. And don’t even get him started on Le Corbusier, Michelangelo and Walter Gropius. “Mies van der Rohe was more interested in how steel met glass than how the sun worked or music sounded, how rivers flooded, or how life was lived,” says Ant, alluding to the Farnsworth House’s multiple floodings since its completion in 1951. “Almost the entire tradition of Western formal architecture has produced sculpture, rather than architecture – and then celebrated the individual as genius. Architecture lost its way a long time ago, and it now sits somewhere between artistic expression, egotistical pursuit and stylish endeavour. We should be building a remarkable future – not architecture for fancy f*****g photos.”

In fact, to Ant, buildings have never been as important as the music, the people and the food inside them, or the landscape surrounding them. “I’m not sure whether it is a coincidence that, in my experience, the unfussier buildings have housed the happier music and the kinder people.”

Ant’s contrarian point of view has served him well in his short career, most notably as a founder of Frankie Pappas – a collective pseudonym for an ever-evolving group that encompasses architects, coders, engineers, artists and designers. It’s a concept, explains Ant, that was inspired by the 1930s collective of mathematicians, Nicolas Bourbaki, who favoured creative collaboration above solitary egotistical pursuit. Literature nerds might recognise the name Frankie Pappas as belonging to that of the unapologetically irreverent character in Willard Manus’s 1966 novel Mott the Hoople. It’s a kind of IYKYK inside joke that pokes fun at the starchitecture culture that sees firms named after their founders. “I think architectural culture is hyper-competitive and narcissistic, to the detriment of calm, considered and careful thought,” says Ant.

Ant came to architecture not via an epiphanous thunderbolt, but rather more boringly, after the recommendation of an aptitude test. “As with anything – relationships, work, bird-watching, drawing, painting, maths, woodwork – love only developed over time, with a certain devotion and curiosity,” he says. Starting during his studies at the University of Cape Town’s School of Architecture, Ant learnt invaluable lessons working at four different architectural firms: Wolff Architects, Noero Architects and StudioMAS in South Africa, and Urban-Think Tank in Zurich.

Heinrich Wolff made an impact on Ant with his brilliant academic mind and ability to rigorously adhere to rules – only to break them if necessary; Jo Noero, with his superior draughtsmanship and obsession with Euclidean geometry; and Sean Mahoney of StudioMAS with his sparse material palette and general unfussiness. As for Hubert Klumpner of Urban-Think Tank, Ant likens him to a contemporary Christopher Alexander – obsessed with the big idea.

Ant maintains that he’s inspired by far more than architecture, though, citing Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson, artists Izzy Duarte and Esther Mahlangu, author Herman Charles Bosman, philosopher Alain de Botton, as well as his late mother, as having influenced his world view the most.

Perhaps to the chagrin of the more traditionally minded of the architectural fraternity, Ant’s unorthodox approach has seen him earn Frankie Pappas a slew of awards, including the International Grand Prize for Best Building in the World, World Dwelling of the Year and Highest Award for Sustainability in Architecture. His widely acclaimed and publicised House of the Big Arch (featured in VISI 107) – the breathtaking “treehouse” that he built in the Waterberg nature reserve for his late mother, Nadine – perhaps best encapsulates Ant’s philosophy of architecture being a beautiful solution to a complex problem.

“The form of a building is the direct result of unpacking every single constraint of a project, and of deliberately studying how these constraints work in relation to one another,” says Ant. “In House of the Big Arch, our principal parameter was the need to build a dwelling in a riverine forest without removing a single tree. More philosophically, it was to celebrate and lionise the bushveld surrounds by limiting our interference with nature in every way possible. To have been able to work on something like this for seven years with someone so dear was the most wonderful privilege.”

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The post The Influencer’s Influencer: Ant appeared first on Visi.

The Epione Health Villages team, in collaboration with architecture firm Frankie Pappas, transformed an old office building into a community-based healthcare facility – Epione Health Village Rosebank.

The driver behind this new development is a critical one: providing accessible and affordable primary healthcare to all South Africans. Yet this is no stock-standard rollout of austere, unfriendly community clinics: the Epione Health Villages (EHV) team is rethinking the concept, and striving to bring dignity and warmth to healthcare through the design of space and furniture.

From waiting rooms to consulting rooms, every area of the Epione Health Village Rosebank (EHVR) has been carefully considered to create a calming and serene environment, eliminating extra stress. After all, who needs any more of that when they’re not feeling well?

“Why not create private nooks with great light, plants and ventilation, or a coffee shop and bagel stand on a public plaza?” says Ant Vervoort of Frankie Pappas. “These are the stories with which we approach our designs – we interrogate the everyday and find the extraordinary in it.”

READ MORE: Frankie Pappas Award-winning House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys

Using architecture, the team planned to merge the spaces with EHV’s driving philosophy – that healthcare is one of the highest expressions of humanity. “Does it follow the status quo of hospitals being places of cold light, incessant bleeps and the smell of antiseptic? Or do we produce a hospital where sunlight, running water and the smell of petrichor are the sensorial keystones? I don’t think it’s controversial to argue for the latter,” Ant says.

The EHVR project is where this healthcare model is being perfected, but it will eventually be replicated many times over. If you sort out basic medical issues (like family care and women’s health) early on, you can prevent further complications down the line. It’s a concept that applies to all South African communities.

“Our flagship facility in Rosebank is our hub, servicing not only the affluent, but also low-income neighbourhoods such as Alexandra,” says EHV founder Garikai Govati. “We will continue this path of inclusivity with our next facilities in South Africa, eventually taking it to the rest of Africa. Our goal is to have a presence in every South African province in the next 24 to 36 months via a hub-and-spoke model.”

A series of furniture has been designed especially for the clinics. All the pieces allow for maximum utility of space, and interaction between the medical staff and their patients.

So, for example, the team are prototyping locally produced timber furniture that offers storage for supplies without having a cold, clinical edge. As Dr Samantha Fee of EHVR explains, “It all comes down to patient satisfaction – seeing their faces when they enter the space and watching the children interact with it, calming down before they go for what would have otherwise been a traumatic experience of health-seeking.”

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The post Design for Life: Epione Health Village Rosebank appeared first on Visi.

With a rare vantage point on the natural world, this distinctive Waterberg home’s design was dictated by its sylvan surrounds.

In a private reserve in the Waterberg, three hours north of Johannesburg, a series of buildings crouches camouflaged in a forest. You’d struggle to see them among the dense foliage, even from above. Two of those buildings – House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys – constitute the home of a pair of veterinary scientists, a husband and wife whose passion for nature and the great outdoors drew them to this wild corner of the country.

Owing to its location on a 5 000-hectare farm-turned nature reserve, it’s not uncommon to see giraffe, leopard or genet, and an abundance of birds, from the paradise flycatcher to the yellow-bellied greenbul. It was during a ramble here that the owners came across a sandstone promontory that plunges into the riverine forest below, and decided that this very spot was to be their home.

READ MORE: Pinelands Home

As if contending with a steep gradient in a forest in the middle of the bushveld wasn’t enough to challenge their architect, their brief to him was “simply” to construct a tree house, without removing a single tree from the site. The young architect, who collaborates with a host of brilliant minds under the collective pseudonym Frankie Pappas, had the site Lidar-scanned to map the all-important trees.

For the homeowners, the Frankie Pappas ethos of forgoing ego and working mutually for a greater purpose struck a chord. The land should suffer minimal interference, they agreed, with the notion that one day, having served its purpose, the building will hopefully be swallowed up by the environment altogether. By “connecting the back end of the building to the sandstone as though it were a boulder”, the architect explains, the cliff becomes part of the home’s narrative. The initial stock-brick structure – and others that follow in front of it – are linked by enclosed timber “bridges”, leaving the ground free for animals to make their passage underneath.

READ MORE: About Face: Contemporary Face Brick Buildings

“You enter at the back of the home, at the cliff, and by the time you’ve reached the arch at the front end, you’re five metres up in the forest canopy,” the architect explains. Due to the limitations of finding a straight run between the trees, the main house (House of the Big Arch) is 3.3 metres wide and 22 metres at its full length. This long, skinny structure is wedged among trunks and branches, occasionally bulging out here or there to accommodate a dombeya or a monkey orange tree.

In an unconventional move, the bedroom is located some 50 metres away along a cliff path in the House of the Tall Chimneys. Here, bedroom and bathroom share an intimate connection with the trees.

Not only is the home completely off the grid, it also requires very little energy to run. It is positioned on a north-south axis, with its length facing east and west, and is designed to facilitate natural flows of cool air into and through the interior. Frankie Pappas also devised a series of chimneys that use an evaporative cooling system to further regulate the temperature.

The building’s language is neither contemporary nor old. The entrance is a narrow shaft that towers nine metres above ground, its arch emerging through the foliage; a dome is seen here, a column there. It’s a meeting of basic forms that delights the eye – a man-made creation sculpted by the land.

Frankie Pappas was recently included in the annual Wallpaper* Architects Directory as one of the Top 20 emerging architectural talents from across the globe.

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The post Waterberg Home appeared first on Visi.