COMPLIED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Niel Vosloo (Robertson Cottage); Elsa Young (Scarborough House, Umdloti home, Greenside Home, Malmesbury Home, Johannesburg Home Pniel Farmhouse, Witklipfontein Eco Lodge, Eclectic Hout Bay Home); Dook (Monaghan Farm House, Keurboomstrand Home, Montagu Home, Modern Pretoria Home, Minimalist Joburg Home, Oudtshoorn Heritage Home); Greg Cox (Steenberg Home, Modular Scarborough House, Nieu-Bethesda Home, Modern Hout Bay Home, Lanseria Estate Home); Nicolas Mathéus (Menorcan Home, Provence Farmhouse); Paris Brummer (Franschhoek Home, Kerala Estate Cottage); Warren Heath (Klein Karoo Home); Lar Glutz (Salt Rock Home)

Whether nestled among indigenous plants or surrounded by centuries-old trees, these homes invite you to escape the everyday and immerse yourself in a world of natural beauty. These houses from the VISI archives showcase the timeless allure of a gorgeous garden.

Robertson Cottage

For three years, Etienne Hanekom drove past a derelict 150-year-old cottage on his way to his grand old Victorian in Robertson, without noticing the nondescript ochre building. Then, one day, a friend told him that a small cottage near his house was for sale. Upon finally noticing it and entering it for the first time, Etienne instantly fell for both its dimensions and the price.

“It was a forgettable, run-down, sad little house,” Etienne says. “A long, narrow house built of clay with four windows and a front door. Yet I walked in and knew I wanted it. The house had a certain atmosphere that I liked, a feeling that resonated with me.”

There is always a house that winds its way into Etienne’s heart. These are his personal projects. And they are always very personal, even when they’re not meant to be.

As he began to transform the dilapidated cottage, Etienne fell more for it. He mostly works with large spaces, but he has a particular fondness for small ones. By the time he had completed the pink vaulted bathroom, he had sold his much larger Victorian house down the road and was making plans to move into the narrow little cottage.

Read the full story on this Robertson Cottage.

Scarborough House

“I thought I was a city girl – until I spent lockdown in Scarborough,” says South African film director Nicole Ackermann. That this small coastal village just outside Cape Point Nature Reserve in Cape Town is now her home was as much a surprise to her as it was to her family and friends. A place of wild winds and brutally cold water, its untamed beauty is not for everyone – yet it struck a chord with the globe-trotting Nicole the moment she arrived. “My time here changed my outlook and values significantly. Up until then, I was more outwardly seeking for inspiration; now I realise the value of looking inwards more.”

When the world returned to “normal”, Nicole found herself back in Los Angeles for work, but regularly trawling property websites in the hopes of finding a home in Scarborough. “It was quite a revelation that, although living here wasn’t necessarily what I had envisaged for myself, it was what I desperately craved.” So when this house came up for sale, her family were sent to check it out. “I remember my sister sending me a video that she took outside the back kitchen door,” says Nicole with a smile. “Hearing the cicadas and the sound of the ocean made me incredibly emotional; it was like a homecoming. Just like that, it was a done deal – I literally bought it unseen.”

Read the full story on this Scarborough house.

Umdloti House

It was a serendipitous Sunday drive that delivered the current owners to this prime property in Umdloti. They were met by spectacular views out towards the local surf break, and a 400-year-old milkwood standing sentinel in the front garden. “We had been thinking about buying a home in Umdloti for a while, so to happen upon this place without trying too hard felt like the realisation of a dream,” they say.

Although the couple live full time on a farm on the North Coast, the family have a long association with Umdloti, dating back to the early 1900s, when a great-grandfather lived there.“ We have great memories of the times we spent here over the years, and we wanted to emulate that with our own children,” say the owners. “The original house was tucked away behind such an overgrown garden that you couldn’t see the sea, and you had to fight your way through an impenetrable banana plantation to get to the milkwood,” they add.

Read the full story on this Umdloti house.

Monaghan Farm House

This house in Monaghan Farm in Lanseria, on a beautiful spot overlooking a bend in the Jukskei River, began with a bold, Brutalist architectural idea – but the result is an incredibly subtle, sensitive response to its setting. The owners, Wendy and Lukas van Niekerk wanted a home made entirely of steel and raw, exposed concrete, and this spectacular plot of land offered them the chance to build from scratch. Lukas, an engineer, is a huge fan of the work of 20th-century Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, who is famous for his sensitive use of concrete as well as experiments with concrete and steel – and the Van Niekerks’ architect, Enrico Daffonchio, went to school in Scarpa’s hometown of Venice in Italy. The fates had aligned.

Despite what Enrico refers to as its “strong architectural language”, the house they designed together is nestled into the landscape and, when viewed from higher up the hill, is practically invisible (helped by the green roofs planted with endemic grasses to recreate the landscape it’s built on). It is, quite literally, sunken into the landscape to keep its presence unobtrusive.

You descend from street level to the front door via steps that lead to a path through a courtyard. The bold simplicity of the forms – the slim, straight lines of the roof and overhangs – belie the complexity of the way the house is knitted into its setting, with courtyards and “green fingers” all around bringing the landscape and vegetation up to and between the rooms.

Read the full story on this Monaghan Farm house.

Steenberg Home

There are houses in beautiful settings that try to disappear into the landscape. Others like to perch on a prominent spot and lord over all they survey. This one – a holiday home on a big semi-rural plot on the side of the Steenberg mountains in Cape Town – does neither. Its weighty walls and solid masses seem to emerge from the ground and assert themselves unapologetically on the mountainside, yet the indigenous gardens around its edges blend with the natural fynbos, so it looks as if it is being reclaimed by nature. It is undeniably there, but somehow doesn’t seem like an imposition.

Parts of it form big, monolithic blocks, and others are almost pavilion-like – glass-sided, so you can see all the way through the house from one end to the other – but even they have heavy-looking roofs. An oversailing canopy seems to rest on one section but float above another, overlapping. In many ways, the house has no obvious “face”. It twists around, without a clear front or back. It’s a house that, from the moment you see it, prompts questions. Why does it have those angles? Why doesn’t the floating roof touch the roof below? Why is it even oversailing? But that’s the point. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” says its architect, Chris van Niekerk. There’s a randomness about the way parts of the house have been assembled, intuitively, “like a child playing with blocks”. It has a pleasing, comfortable composition, but it doesn’t explain itself or seem to comply with any rigid and ordered logic.

Read the full story on this Steenberg home.

Menorcan Home

Location, they say, is everything – and “they” would certainly give this one the thumbs-up. With the sea on the horizon, and framed by dry-stone walls softened by pines, olive trees and palms, this idyllic four-hectare estate is situated on Menorca – one of Spain’s Balearic Islands clustered in the Mediterranean.

Known for its sandy beaches, warm waters and megalithic stone monuments, as well as a population that loves a good music fest (including the International Organ Festival) and its unique wine-based gin, Menorca is certainly one of the ideal places on the planet to build a family getaway. This property, originally a farmhouse, was once owned by a family from Barcelona, who had the temerity to divide it into three separate flats. Thankfully, the beautiful home has now been remodelled and restored by its new owners, who proved to be far more sympathetic to its origins.

Read the full story on this Menorcan 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.

Modular Scarborough Home

As the owners and founders of hope distillery, one of the first small-batch distillers of craft gin in South Africa, Leigh Lisk and Lucy Beard had grown tired of living on-site at their distillery in Cape Town, and wanted a bolthole to which they could escape every weekend. “Both Leigh and I are keen cyclists and runners who love the outdoors, and so the natural beauty of Scarborough and its proximity to the city made it an obvious choice for us,” says Lucy.

Initially, they had bought an old, abandoned tennis court in the coastal village with a view to building on that, but the prospect of a two-year brick-and-mortar build saw them buy an old one-bedroom, prefab home in the village as a stopgap. “We initially saw it as an interim house that would allow us to stay in Scarborough while overseeing the build – but we ended up loving the house so much that it has become our home.”

Having long admired the German Huf Haus (a prefab-style home) as well as the tiny house movement (an architectural and social philosophy that advocates the simplification of living spaces), the idea for something small and sustainable quickly took hold. “We liked the idea of building a modular structure that would blend into the environment with minimal impact, and a container home made sense as it’s less expensive than building from scratch,” says Lucy.

Read the full story on this modular Scarborough home.

Keurboomstrand Home

There was a non-negotiable in the client brief: respect the land. It’s not difficult to see why – the parcel of earth the residence was built on is pristinely beautiful. “The farm is situated near Plettenberg Bay, on a large portion of land filled with indigenous forest, with rivers running through it and a view of the Tsitsikamma Mountains,” says architect Paul Oosthuizen, giving context to his client’s instructions. “There was one patch of invasive wattle on the land, which was cleared – this became the area we developed.”

To find the perfect spot on which to build, Paul surveyed the sloped piece of land by climbing some of the tall trees on its periphery, then decided on the bottom of the hill, so the house could be nestled into the forest and give his client a view of the riverbed. Next up, Simon Hart and his team at No Fuss Construction brought Paul’s vision to life. The result is a home that feels intimately connected to its woodsy surroundings, and secluded from the world beyond. In fact, reaching it is a pursuit that requires visitors to make the last 60-metre journey on foot.“ As you approach, you drive along a road that’s right up against the forest to your left,” says Paul. “You then park in a garage that’s buried underground, get out, and walk along a boardwalk that goes through a canopy of trees, about eight metres off the ground, before you arrive in the courtyard. It offers the guests the sense that they’ve ‘discovered’ a house in the middle of a forest.”

Read the full story on this Keurboomstrand Home.

Malmesbury Home

“There was a wonderful feeling of glamorous decay to her,” says interior designer Etienne Hanekom of the grand old Victorian home he is lovingly restoring in Malmesbury. Languishing elegantly on a ridge overlooking the historic farming town an hour west of Cape Town, the generously proportioned four-bedroom house was built in 1850, when Malmesbury was still a popular destination for its revered hot springs.

Recent history, however, has not been kind. Rapid industrialisation of the town, as well as the ignominious positioning of a busy arterial road right in front of the house, threatened a fate of idle deterioration. Until Etienne stepped in. “I’d been keeping an eye on her, as I frequently used to drive past on my way to visit my parents,” he says. On an impulse, he decided to stop for a closer look, and discovered that the rambling 2 500m2 property took up an entire residential block, and had several unused outbuildings. The main house still retained original, metal- pressed ceiling tiles, timber floorboards and shutters, cast-iron fireplaces, and a deep front stoep so particular to its era.

Read the full story on this Malmesbury home.

Johannesburg Home

In Johannesburg, there’s no mountain and there’s no sea,” says architect Anthony Orelowitz, referring to homes in Cape Town that tend to look outwards, seeking to catch a glimpse of the ocean or frame a view of Table Mountain. “Here, you have to create your own habitat.” And that, at heart, was the basis of his response to Johannesburg’s urban character when he designed his own home in the city’s forested suburbs. Anthony’s firm, Paragon, is responsible for some of the city’s most significant commercial architectural landmarks – but, he says, “I hadn’t done a house in nearly 15 years.” Nevertheless, working closely with architect Elliot Marsden and interior designer Julia Day, he conjured a vision of what it means to make a home in Joburg, at once perfectly suited to the city and utterly unlike its neighbours.

To create his habitat, Anthony turned to the archetype of the atrium house: an internal courtyard wrapped on all sides by the house, creating a peaceful sanctuary at its heart, open to the sky. He calls it a “self-contained oasis in the city”. The house is essentially a series of pavilions, with vast sliding doors and screens that can be opened and closed to reconfigure a mosaic of spaces in a variety of ways. (A new rail system had to be designed to manage the massive glass panels that make up the sliding doors.)

Read the full story on this Johannesburg home.

Provence Farmhouse

One might’ve expected a couple to pick Tuscany as their European home, but it was an area northeast of Marseille in Provence that they chose instead. Dazzled by the beauty of the place and its historical heritage, for 20 years this globetrotting family had rented houses in the area, waiting for the ideal moment to buy their own. A few years ago, they were lucky enough to find a Provençal farmhouse in its original condition that had once belonged to the family of 19th-century French novelist Alphonse Daudet – and its renovation turned out to be a fascinating journey.

Steering the makeover was architect Pierre-Olivier Brèche, head of the multidisciplinary firm POBA. “I was immediately drawn to the wonderful topography of sloping land – it was an opportunity to play with levels of patios, terraced gardens and roof lines,” he says.

Read the full story on this Provence farmhouse.

Nieu-Bethesda Cottage

Most famous for its legendary, reclusive, eccentric resident, artist Helen Martins, and her home, the Owl House, the town of Nieu-Bethesda is as far as you can get from South Africa’s big metropoles. From Joburg, it’ll take you just under nine hours to get to this remote dot nestled among the koppies of the semi-arid Great Karoo; it might be 15 minutes less from Cape Town. And that’s just one reason that made Joburg couple Marc Watson and James Moffatt’s decision to buy a house here a brave one. The other was that they bought it without seeing the interior.

Visiting here as tourists in 2018, they bought the cottage based purely on its charming iron friezes and traditional wooden shutters, only guessing at what was hidden behind the heritage façade. “But we had a good sense of what such a traditional home would hold,” says Marc.

Read the full story on this Nieu-Bethesda cottage.

Pniel Farmhouse

Smitten by its location in the picturesque village of Pniel at the foot of the Simonsberg mountain in Stellenbosch, Dané Erwee and Chris Willemse bought this 2.5-hectare piece of land 10 years ago. The idea was to start a flower farm that could supply their floral retail business, Okasie. “There was nothing here then besides a few gardenia bushes and plum trees,” recalls Chris, a horticulturist. “Our first mission was to build a road that would allow the builders to access the land.”

Architect Henri Comrie was entrusted to design the house. “We chose Henri for his strong ideas, and because we knew he’d give us something timeless,” says Dané, a master florist and landscape designer. “In fact, his answer to our brief for a re-imagined farmhouse was so spot on that, from the moment we received the proposed plans for this house, we honestly didn’t change a thing.”

Set between two peaks, the 400m2 house strikes an iconic pose against its backdrop of majestic mountains. “It’s like a temple that locks the peaks into its power forever,” explains Henri. “The idea was that, by establishing itself as a central place in this huge landscape, the house is able to command a potency far exceeding its size.”

Read the full story on this Pniel farmhouse.

Witklipfontein Eco Lodge

Architect Xavier Huyberechts has a wonderfully poetic way of describing the way he designed the weekend getaway he and his brother, Damien, built on their farm in the Vredefort Dome – the oldest and biggest meteorite impact site on the planet. He wanted to “gently lift the carpet at the bottom of the hill and slide the house underneath”.

And that’s exactly what he’s done. A green roof runs seamlessly from the hillside and over the house, like a blanket of earth that renders it almost invisible from many angles. In fact, the way it has been designed and built means it can – and will, at the end of its life – disintegrate and become reabsorbed into the earth. It’s made almost entirely from the earth, and emphatically for the earth.

Xavier runs a commercial architectural practice in Johannesburg known for pioneering sustainable architecture. With Damien taking on the role of building contractor, they set about creating an earth house using local materials. It may be built of stacked stone, rammed earth, handmade compacted earth bricks and earth bags, but this is no Hobbit burrow. Beneath that green roof is a clean-lined, low-slung, modernist-inspired villa, with lofty volumes and floor-to- ceiling glass doors that slide away into wall cavities and open the house completely to the surrounding landscape.

Read the full story on the Witklipfontein Eco Lodge.

Franschhoek Home

It has been a 21-year-long labour of love. Marti Heyns-Foster admits that, when she first moved into her corner home on a shaded street in the Winelands, it wasn’t her dream abode. But it had good bones, high ceilings, original wooden floors and plenty of natural light, and the young mother knew she could work with the basics. Over the following two decades, with her sharp eye for the quirky and the unique, Marti lovingly curated a sanctuary filled with French-inspired decor and objects. “In my opinion, a home should evolve over time, reflecting your changing tastes as you develop as person,” she says. “A real home is a representation of how all the members of the household live and grow.”

The property is set far back from public view, at a jaunty angle. In front, a formal French garden spills out towards the road, the result of a visit to a château in the Loire Valley that overlooked a striking landscape. “My friend, designer André Carl van der Merwe (author of Moffie), was there with me to celebrate a friend’s birthday, and he sketched out the garden for me, creating an illusion of symmetry.” Today, dominated by two ancient white stinkwood trees, Marti’s indigenous rhus-hedged garden is not yet two years old – and is a genteel alternative to the white pebbles that filled the space before.

Read the full story on this Franschhoek home.

Kerala Estate Cottage

The vast tracts of private land that fan out from the Witte and Bastiaanskloof rivers in the Bainskloof Valley are home to the elusive Cape leopard and impressive birdlife. This is the Kerala Estate and reserve, and being here is a nature lover’s ultimate escape – a chance to unplug while appreciating the fynbos-scented air and the thrill of bracing mountain-water swims.

Keri Paddock and husband Sam understand this appeal, and after purchasing their sweeping Bainskloof property in 2018, set about creating serene living spaces so their family and friends can fully benefit from the surroundings. In fact, their 800-hectare chunk of paradise forms part of the Boland Mountain Complex in the Cape Floral Region, one of nine areas in South Africa designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.

With a clear idea in mind, the couple tasked architect Bridget George of KLG Architects with updating the existing buildings. They also contracted landscaping company Oasis Design to integrate the dwellings into the terrain, and to create unexpected garden spaces filled with fynbos and proteas.

Read the full story on this Kerala Estate cottage.

Montagu Home

The scenic Route 62 o the Klein Karoo unfolds into vivid pictures of rolling rocky mountains and lush vineyards, followed by a slow ascent as you head into the historic town of Montagu, as well-known for its beautifully preserved buildings as it is for its hiking trails. The old town might seem an unusual location for this modern and minimalist home, but it turns out to be ideal for a hideaway in which time stands still.

“Hendre transformed the design into something we love,” says homeowner Martly Calitz of the interior designer who pieced together the significant details that make this home unique – including the decision to paint it mostly white with touches of black, which sets off the warm, earthy terracotta floors beautifully. Hendre Bloem is known for his clean and modern yet luxurious aesthetic, and he very much shared the couple’s vision of creating a home that embodies the maxim “less is more”.

Read the full story on this Montagu home.

Klein Karoo Farmhouse

With a reputation for designing trailblazing buildings across the globe, Greg Truen and his partner Nancy Kashimoto chose to use a different approach when taking on the renovation of a 200-year-old farmhouse. Instead of putting their own contemporary spin on the structure, they breathed new life into the property in the most respectful way. “The idea was always to keep what I found on the farm as pure as possible,” says Greg. Lured by the charming building in Buffelsdrift, a farming district nestled between the Swartberg and Langeberg mountains, Greg embarked on a design and renovation process that spanned four years and would transform the neglected property into a working olive farm.

The property included outbuildings that Greg also saw potential in – the old wine store, for example, would be given a second life as a guest suite. One of the challenges he faced was that some of the previous additions hadn’t been done particularly sensitively and, he says, “I wanted to strip the farmhouse back to what it was, and let it sit in a less encumbered way in the landscape.”

The buildings had been constructed using the poured earth method, and covered with various types of plaster over the years. Greg chose to collaborate with architect Jaco Booyens, who has a particular interest in building with clay and earth.

Read the full story on this Klein Karoo farmhouse.

Eclectic Hout Bay Home

The Hout Bay home that creative director, interior designer and curator Tracy Lynch and husband Frank van Reenen (the equally off-the-charts artist, sculptor and animator) share with their teenage daughter Franny perfectly expresses their unique view on the world. As founder of Studio Lee Lynch and the creative director of Nando’s Design Programme, much of Tracy’s is work is about reinvention; Frank’s is also inventive, but with a side order of dark, playful and wacky.

Three years ago, when they decided to swap their inner-city Victorian home in Cape Town for a spacious out-of-towner, they were looking for a well-designed space they could move into immediately. “A new, modern space is contrary to anything we’d ever lived in before, but as my days are creatively charged, I was hankering after something calm, structured and resolved,” says Tracy. But that never happened. Not long into the house-hunting process, they fell in love with – and bought – a garden… with peacocks, a vineyard and a garden cottage as part of the package.

Read the full story on this eclectic Hout Bay home.

Salt Rock Home

It’s a great house to wake up in every morning, and a great house to dwell in,” says interior designer and artist Lisa Twyman of her home. “It makes you feel free, positive, motivated, excited.”

Lisa and husband Will Haynes fell in love with the plot situated in Salt Rock, on the Indian Ocean coastline north of Durban, because of its geography – so much so that the build became very much about the garden. “We did not want to impose on it or mess up the flow of it too much,” she says. “During the first few years that we lived here, any extra budget was spent on the garden and planting.”

The key principle for Lisa and Will was that the house needed to become a part of the landscape. This meant including elements such as a ground-floor living area that opens up completely to the outdoors, allowing the spaces to be opened or enclosed as required. This “blurred boundary” – as Lisa describes it – between interior and exterior is further enhanced by the fully open-plan nature of the living, dining and kitchen spaces, as well as the application of simple, low-maintenance materials such as unadorned off-shutter concrete, and the balau wood used for cladding and screening where necessary.

Read the full story on this Salt Rock home.

Modern Hout Bay Home

It was 13 years ago in 2007, that New Yorkers Jim Brett and Ed Gray were first enchanted by Cape Town. At the time, Jim was Head of Home at leading US retailer Anthropologie and was on a buying trip to South Africa with local design promoter and exporter Trevyn McGowan of The Guild Group. The three of them embarked on a trip cross-country, visiting the studios of artisans and designers, and formed an immediate bond. “I had never met anyone who could match my passion for handicraft and design,” Jim says of Trevyn.

“As we travelled to South Africa more often, we fell in love with the country, specifically Cape Town and its environs,” Ed says. So, it came as no surprise to family and friends when he and Jim decided to build a home for themselves in Hout Bay, just 30 minutes from Cape Town’s city centre, in which they hope to eventually spend six months of the year. Enlisting the help of Trevyn and her husband and business partner Julian, it was only natural that they would continue their trajectory of working with local designers, furnishing the home with pieces by some of the country’s most prominent names.

Read the full story on this modern Hout Bay home.

Modern Pretoria Home

Our journey on this project started with a phone call, which turned into a fascinating conversation,” says architect Greté van As of meeting the owners of this striking home for the first time. Having distilled their passion for balance between nature, people and architecture into an award-winning signature style, architectural duo Johan Wentzel and Greté van As of W Design Architecture Studio were, she says, thrilled at the opportunity to design a new residence for a like-minded family on one of the last pieces of pristine bushveld in Pretoria.

Blessed with spectacular views towards the north, and with the magnificent Bronberg Mountain as a backdrop, the architects were inspired to design a home that would merge unobtrusively into this very unique landscape. “We challenged ourselves to leave behind the smallest of footprints while introducing built structures into the sensitive surroundings,” Johan says.

Read the full story on this modern Pretoria home.

Lanseria Estate Home

When architect Gillian Holl set about designing a house for the generous piece of paradise she shares with her husband Ivan, an engineer, and son Noah, one of her first considerations was to create a space that did not simply blend in with the surrounding grasslands and Magaliesberg foothills, but was actually knitted into the landscape.

To this end, the Holls excavated to allow the steel-framed building with floating concrete slabs and swathes of glass to settle unobtrusively on the riverside terrain. But estate regulations required all excavated earth remain on-site – and even after creating the grassy berms that hug the garden, there was still plenty left over. The solution? A central rammed-earth wall that forms an axis from the entrance all the way through the airy house.

Read the full story on this Lanseria Estate home.

Minimalist Joburg Home

Edoardo Villa’s journey had been a long one: from Italy to South Africa as a prisoner of war, and from classic realism to abstract modernism as an artist. After his release, he chose to stay on in Johannesburg and for a time lived and worked at the home of artist Douglas Portway in Kew, a suburb on the eastern fringe of the city.

Villa soon became a prominent figure in the local art world and in the great surge of creative innovation that lit up the middle of the century. He was able to buy the Portway house in 1959, and in 1968 commissioned Ian McLennan to design a house for him on the same property, giving him no brief and a very small budget.

It was a time when the symmetries and conventions of old suburbia were being turned inside out. Streets were walled off, living spaces opened up, on to courtyards, bricked patios and a new seclusion. Flow and transparency became all-important, framed in a new vernacular of simple materials and earthy textures.

Read the full story on this minimalist Joburg home.

Oudtshoorn Heritage Home

All Karoo towns have their own rustic appeal, but Oudtshoorn has panache. The flamboyant spirit of the feather barons lives on in its lavish sandstone buildings with their broekielace fretwork – and in its feisty charm.

Interior designer David Strauss succumbed to this charm five years ago while looking for a house to buy for once-a-month getaways from Cape Town. He found a solid old sandstone classic, built in the town’s Victorian heyday, in West Bank. No palace this: a deep stoep, a string of small rooms off a wide central passage, the only flourish a wagon-wheel precast fence. Some renovation was necessary, but the age of the house meant the exterior could not be modified and any alterations would have to be undertaken under the strict eye of the heritage authorities.

“I was a bit lost to start off with because I knew nobody,” says David. “But this is such a friendly town. And everybody knows everybody else, which is very helpful. If you get stuck, you just ask somebody, anybody.”

Read the full story on this Oudtshoorn heritage home.

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The post 26 Enchanting Garden Homes appeared first on Visi.

Veld Architects’ Gillian Holl was recently introduced to the architectural wonders of Dombeya, built by artist Alexis Preller, when she was called on by its new owners to help restore some of the buildings. In this instalment of our popular series that celebrates landmark local buildings, she takes us through the story of the almost-mythical complex – and the two men who conjured it.

The Basics

Over the 20 or so years that the visionary 20th century artistic icon Alexis Preller lived at Dombeya, his smallholding near Brits, he almost always had a new building project on the go. From the mid-1950s onwards, Preller constructed a complex of buildings that in the end included his house and studio, a guesthouse, a swimming pool and changing room, and his swan song – a remarkable gallery/museum space known as the Mudhif.

A vaulted brick building inspired by the giant arched grass structures made by the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, the Mudhif was a tribute to Preller’s devoted friend, the architect Norman Eaton, who died in 1966 after a car accident, and left much of his collection of art and artefacts to Preller. The Mudhif was intended to house Eaton’s collection.

Eaton and Preller shared an appreciation for design from all over Africa, from local Ndebele architecture
to the art and design they encountered further afield. They travelled extensively throughout the continent, and their mutual interests and ideas found expression in both Eaton’s architecture and Preller’s art. The two men, in turn, also influenced each other.

Preller’s paintings were filled with myth, symbolism and cosmology, veering from the surreal to the abstract. Dedicated to making an art of Africa, he once said that his aim was “to identify myself with my age and place: Africa, and the 20th century”. His buildings at Dombeya were a manifestation of that artistic ambition, too.

Eaton was a similarly solitary figure. Architectural historian Clive Chipkin describes him as “a remote figure outside the hurly-burly of general practice”. Preller described his work as having “an African quality”, which is now understood as a rare, pioneering example of a uniquely African language of “regional Modernism”. His use of carvings, mosaics and intricate brick patterning blurred the distinction between architecture and decoration.

At its Zenith

After buying an empty expanse of subdivided farmland with views of the Magaliesberg, Preller started building at Dombeya in October 1956. “With some advice from Norman Eaton, he designed a very basic house: a large single room for living, working, eating and sleeping, with glass doors on the south side looking out on the Dombeya tree,” writes Esmé Berman, coauthor of Alexis Preller: A Visual Biography. A few years later, when he received the commission to paint a mural for the Transvaal Provincial Administration building in Pretoria, Preller had to build a new studio big enough to house the canvasses.

In 1966, he began planning architectural additions again, including a guesthouse. This time, he took inspiration from Eaton’s creative use of brickwork. The new guest suite not only features one of those amazing mosaic floors, but also a mural by Erich Frey (who was actually a jeweller) made with rectangular copper sheets designed to catch the light – sunlight by day, candlelight by night. In 1970, Preller added a swimming pool and the conical changing-room tower (which looked a lot like the structures he’d been painting for years). Eventually, in 1974, he began building the Mudhif, the museum/gallery he had envisioned to house the Eaton collection, and which would incorporate a pair of carved wooden doors that Eaton had brought back from Zanzibar. The building was never finished, although its shell and another staggering mosaic floor were completed.

In December 1975, Preller went into hospital for an operation, where he unfortunately passed away. He was buried at Dombeya alongside his partner, Guna Massyn. The property was sold in 1977.

The State of Play Today

Dombeya’s new owners are in discussion with Veld Architects about the restoration of the remaining buildings in the complex. Some have been altered beyond recognition, but the guesthouse, the studio and the Mudhif – including the magnificent floors – are intact. Even the changing room next to the swimming pool is still standing.

Why the Building Matters

Its place in local art and architectural history alone makes it significant. The stories that swirl around this place are still told and retold in art auction catalogues whenever important Preller works appear for sale. Eaton’s legacy is much better appreciated now, and questions about climate, landscape, materials, culture and identity that he began exploring all those years ago are front of mind for architects once again. As the epicentre of Preller and Eaton’s intellectual and artistic collaborations, Dombeya embodies a unique intersection between African identity and modernity.

Not Many People Know that…

The Zanzibar doors originally intended for the Mudhif now belong to another artist and academic (and notable Preller expert), Professor Karel Nel. After Preller’s and Massyn’s deaths, the doors were auctioned off. Years later, Nel went to great lengths to track them down, and had them incorporated into his own Dombeya-inspired, barrel-vaulted house and studio – which he named Mudhif.

We Love it Because

In Preller’s foreword to Norman Eaton: Architect, he concluded: “With him, magic and reality and truth were absolutes; interchangeable, and, very often, one.” He could be describing Dombeya. The incredible decorative details – the floors and murals! – are an integral part of an overarching vision here, not an add-on. Craft, construction and architecture are one. To have the opportunity to restore it and bring it back to its former glory is beyond exciting.

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Built for twin sisters – each with different tastes – this home in Monaghan Farm eco-estate explores how a fusion of art and architecture makes a home’s connection with its setting more profound and meaningful than simply providing a pleasant view.

For Gillian Holl, owner of the award-winning Veld Architects, this must have been one of the more unusual briefs to receive from a client – or, in this case, clients. It was for twin sisters Ansi and Renette Buitendag who, after spending most of their adult lives apart, decided to build a home together. Not only would each have a wing to herself, converging on a shared kitchen, dining and living area, but each had distinct architectural tastes. Renette preferred a Modernist approach – a building with a “connection to the landscape”; while Ansi favoured a style that was “bold, strong and minimalist”.

The location they had selected was on the Monaghan Farm eco-estate in Lanseria – a sunken, tranquil spot below the road, overlooking the Jukskei River. It was a location that demanded further specific considerations too. Only three percent of the land on Monaghan Farm will be developed, so the natural setting will be preserved for posterity. The beautiful landscape of rolling hills, grasslands and rivers poses the question to all architects who build here: what sort of relationship to create between nature and architecture? How best to connect with this landscape? What makes us feel at home here? Both sisters are art lovers, bringing with them substantial collections of art, so the relationship between art and life was also thrown into the mix.

Gillian’s response, in the end, hinged on an old Frank Lloyd Wright quote: “The mother art is architecture.” She would weave Ansi and Renette’s love of art into the very fabric of the building, and through a complex layering of bespoke and collaborative efforts with local artisans, artists and crafters create a home-as-monument that would celebrate life and art. It would be strong and sheltering and, rather than simply delivering pleasing views, mediate a more complex relationship with its setting.

To accommodate Renette’s more Modernist approach, Gillian designed a series of pavilions that open up to their surroundings via large windows and screens, with colonnades and pergolas that seem to extend out into the landscape and scoop it in. Although she chose a material palette in which pure concrete and steel predominate, Gillian points out that there is a level of delicacy and detail in this design that softens it and gives it a feminine character.

For Ansi, Gillian created a series of distinct “sculptural elements in the landscape”: three interconnected buildings – one concrete, one rusted Corten steel, and one clad in metal sheeting reminiscent of barns or agricultural buildings. This part of the house represents an unashamedly robust and object-forming approach to architecture, with distinct, simplified forms.

Marrying the two sections is a central living space, which blends the light and the solid, the robust and the delicate, the bold and the intricate. This more social or communal area is defined by a light roof that floats above a solid base. Clerestory windows allow natural light to wash softly in; a timber latticed ceiling offsets the raw concrete and steel below; and large, laser-cut steel canopies blur the distinction between outside and in. At the entrance, you’re greeted by gabion walls stacked with slate, the stone grounding the building with its “natural” and “authentic” qualities. Its colours also resolve the separate elements, harmonising with the other materials and bringing them together.

Throughout the house, Gillian invited collaborations with a wide range of artists and artisans, crafters and makers. Everywhere you look are unique, beautiful, handcrafted elements: stained-glass windows by The Cutting Edge; custom glass lighting by Glass Forming Academy; and incredible breeze-blocks for which Gillian brought together Wolkberg Casting Studios and Down To The Wire, who create jewellery from poachers’ snares. Much of the cabinetry was designed in collaboration with Veld Architects.

In meeting the challenge of designing a home that would fit in with and add to its beautiful natural setting, Gillian and the owners have responded with a rich, imaginative tapestry of solutions drawn from creative and cultural resources. The house – its robustness, strength and resilience – and its intended longevity are justified as a shelter for humanity’s ongoing and ever-renewable attempts to foster a connection with a place. That celebration makes a home not only for art, but for the inhabitants, too. They’ve dubbed it “Amani”, which means peace in Swahili.

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Ever wondered who inspired our current generation of architects? For Gillian Holl, the founder of Veld Architects, the pure form of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel and the monumentality of Gaudí’s Sagrada Família have both informed her sustainability-centred approach to design.

If Gillian Holl’s parents had had their way, their daughter would have become an optometrist. “But all I kept thinking about was designing creative frames,” she says from her office at Veld Architects’ HQ in Lanseria. “I grew up in the platteland, and wasn’t really exposed to many professions. It’s only when I went to write an aptitude test at RAU and chatted to people there that I realised architecture could be an option. Life happened to me.”

The only child of a mining engineer and a teacher, Gillian moved around a lot as a child due to her father’s job, but always lived in relatively rural towns across the Free State, North West and Gauteng. “My childhood was very grounded in nature,” says Gillian. “We hiked a lot and visited many game reserves. We also had family with farms in North West, where I’d often visit and help to herd cattle. Nature is still one of the biggest influences in my work today.”

The intersection between culture and architecture is another driving force behind the work that Gillian
does at Veld, which she founded in 2003. It’s an ethos that crystallised in the years following her studies – first, in optometry at the former Rand Afrikaans University; then, in architecture at the University of Pretoria. In London, she worked on social housing for a small architectural firm, then saved up to visit all the great masters’ landmarks, from the Pantheon and the Acropolis to the works of Antoni Gaudí, Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry. “By experiencing life and immersing yourself in different cultures, you learn to understand the importance of context, and buildings’ relationship to that,” says Gillian. “The minimalism of Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion in Barcelona is relevant there; but here, not so much. When I returned to South Africa, I had more of an appreciation for our unique context, and the thing that stood out for me is that we’re more of a community.”

Gillian describes her design approach as the result of a gradual layering of architectural principles that have resonated with her over the years: the pure, organic form of the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl; the masterful use of concrete and light in Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp chapel; the level of detailing in Charles Rennie MacKintosh’s Glasgow School of Art; and the originality and sense of daring of Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona. “Gaudí’s work is extraordinary for its time; he wasn’t stuck in convention,” she says. “Sagrada has the playful nature of kids building sandcastles. It’s this monumental building that takes your breath away. And I see nature in that.”

One of the most recent manifestations of Gillian’s divergent influences can be found at Veld’s House Amani, which made the shortlist of the 2022 World Architecture Festival in Lisbon. Set on a farm in Lanseria, the residence is characterised by its raw materiality. Imposing slabs of off-shutter concrete are complemented by feature walls of clay brick, Corten steel, rammed earth and Gabion cages filled with rocks from the site. It’s also a showcase of what sustainable building can be.

“The sustainability of off-shutter concrete in architecture is a controversial issue – but, as is the case with Ronchamp, once the structure is built, it never needs to be painted,” says Gillian. Corten steel was also chosen because the steel alloy has been specifically developed to eliminate the need for painting, and weathers into a rusted patina. The result is a building that embraces its landscape.

House Amani saw Gillian collaborating with a host of artists, craftsmen and artisanal workers, and this human touch is evident at every turn. Bespoke double-glazed stained-glass windows by Cutting Edge Glass project a meditative kaleidoscope of light into the interior; an installation of rocks collected by Gillian and her team from the building site hangs suspended over the dining- room table; and a wall of specially designed breeze blocks by Wolkberg Casting Studios incorporates trelliswork made of repurposed poaching snares by Down to the Wire.

“It makes sense for architecture to unite the arts by creating an umbrella for other craftsmen to exhibit their work and get the opportunity to make a living,” says Gillian. “We have to consider ways in which we can make architecture sustainable not only for the environment, but also for the community around it.

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Warm in winter, cool in summer, architect Gillian Holl‘s house at Monaghan Farm near Lanseria is sustainable, ecologically sound, and an intrinsic part of its surroundings.

It’s a Highveld winter’s day, yet there’s no need to light the Morso fireplace in the centre of Gillian and Ivan Holl’s living room in their house at Lanseria’s Monaghan Farm. That’s because, as the architect who took “around six to eight months” to plan every detail, Gillian set their steel-and-glass house facing just off-north, so the sun spills through for most of the day, penetrating through the glass panels that act as walls and heating the terrazzo tiles that radiate and retain heat. The overhang of the roof optimises the angle of the sun in these cold months. “The solar panels on the roof warm the underfloor water heating and geyser – and the pool for summer days,” says Gillian.

It helps that this house, built in the heart of an authentic African landscape, in a working farm north of Johannesburg has unspoilt, long-range views of the veld with direct sunshine uninterrupted by the shadows of high-density buildings or the sardine-can nature of Tuscan-style developments.

It’s this African countryside “where Nguni cows graze the fields, where there are rolling hills and grasslands,” that spurred Gillian and her mechanical engineer husband Ivan to buy a 3 400sqm stand the same day they took their first day trip to Monaghan. “We went just to humour an architect friend who said we’d love it.”

Ivan is the son of a farmer and Gillian – a self-described “minimalist and a modernist” – the granddaughter of one and both say they have the memory of farms in their blood. “We wanted our four-year-old son Noah, to experience that lifestyle.”

And so began the start of Gillian’s design concept: Her “modernist” bent referenced architect Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and his New National Gallery in Berlin with its “lightweight structure and huge panes of glass giving way to fluid, open spaces”.

“I used a steel-framed structure with slot glass panels for an inside-outside living room. While we constructed a spine wall of rammed earth using excavated soil and lime in line with our ethos of sustainability, the majority of the house – aside from the bedroom areas – is transparent allowing unobstructed views.” On a sunny day, Gillian opens up the panels completely so there are no barriers to the space outside.

The kitchen is “the heart” of their home. “It’s an extension of the architecture of the house. We chose indigenous brown kiaat along with recycled steel. Joinery maker Gustaf Smook made the kitchen cabinets and woodwork so that the kitchen drawers are slanted, contrasting with the streamlined cupboards.”

Smook manufactured most of the wooden furnishings in the house including Noah’s bunk bed and the internal solid wood kiaat doors.

Ivan designed the garage door suspended from a steel beam with steel wheels as well as the grid over their koi dam and the Rhodesian teak herb box. Still, says Gillian, her childhood sweetheart’s most endearing quality is, she says, “that he allows me to dream”.

In summer, they’ll swim in a pool with no chlorine. “It’s environmentally sound and water is filtered using plants” – so sound in fact that they will share the pool with around 50 or so fish.

“Last Sunday was such a beautiful day, the three of us cycled around the farm. We are close to the city, but world’s apart. We are a part of nature.”

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