We showed you the empty shell of a small villa in Richmond, Johannesburg designed by architect Jo Noero. Here, we take a look at how Nicholas de Klerk has turned it into a wonderfully eclectic home.

Nicholas De Klerk is not afraid of anything… except of being ordinary. Looking at his house and listening to his stories, it soon becomes apparent that he has nothing to fear.

“As a young boy I would sit on my grandmother’s veranda in George for hours, just looking at the neon lights. I’ve always yearned for the city, and I always thought I’d want to live in a flat. I searched for a house for two years by climbing onto the roof of every property I was interested in. As soon as I got on the roof of this house, I knew I had found what I was looking for.”

What Nicholas had been looking for was a space he could transform into “a loft on a plot”. His brief to architect Jo Noero was based on the design of the media centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London – he loved the idea of adding something to the top of an existing structure. Nicholas wanted his house to channel the simplicity of Japanese architecture but with some of the panache of Art Deco. “I believe in small and original.”

Together, Jo and Nicholas have achieved nothing short of a feat of practical magic.

Nicholas has put his distinctive fingerprint all over his house – quite literally. The front and back doors are embellished with a massive version of his index fingerprint, while other indicators of his identity characterise the house in the same bold way. Splashes of chartreuse, his favourite colour, are found throughout the house, and his sense of humour is reflected by quirky elements – like a set of shiny limegreen garden gnomes in the kitchen – and collections of various descriptions. “If I happen to have more than two of something, I immediately start collecting more. This isn’t an impulse I can explain; it’s just the way I am.”

Whereas the walls boast a serious collection of South African art and ceramics, the bedroom plays host to a happy band of artist’s mannequins and a specially built cabinet displays a collection of V-shaped pressed glass vases. But the intense commitment to his collector’s impulse is certainly best encapsulated by his incredible collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia.

The top-floor living room doubles as a Coca-Cola museum. The cans, bottles, toys, clothing, artworks and other items featuring the distinctive red-and-white Coca-Cola logo are displayed on shelves designed especially for this purpose. The mass of objects could potentially have been a cacophonous and chaotic shambles, but Nicholas designed the display to form a solid wall at one end of the room that gently fades into the rest of the space, reading as a single design element that draws you into its intricacies without dominating the rest of the space or taking anything away from the magnificent views.

The house is a marvellous merger of high and low art and pure playful mischief – very much like its owner.

Have a look at our Q&A with Jo Noero here.

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What happens when Pieter-Dirk Uys introduces a visionary architect to an imaginative display designer? In the first of a two-part series, we show you the house and exhibition space that Jo Noero created for Nicholas de Klerk – before the big move in.

When Nicholas de Klerk was first introduced to Jo Noero and his work by mutual friend Pieter Dirk-Uys, he knew he had found the architect he’d been looking for. Nicholas had a tiny miner’s house in Richmond, Johannesburg, which he wanted to convert into a space suitable to house himself and his extensive collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia.

Jo understood from the get-go that Nicholas was imagining a show-stopper: “He told me he wants the kind of house that makes passers-by stop, reverse, look again and utter expletives. I think we’ve unashamedly tried to make a beautiful house with great spaces.”

Jo decided to build on the footprint of the old house to make the building process more sustainable. “We didn’t knock down any of the external walls and we built on the existing foundations.”

Initially, Nicholas just wanted to add a second floor for the exhibition space, but then there was talk of another bedroom and a  study. “The ground floor grew to quite a tall volume and we inserted a mezzanine floor. We moved away from the idea of a conventional house with different rooms. What we managed to create was one very big space with a whole lot of bits and pieces in it, which gives Nicholas a huge amount of flexibility to move things around.”

The exterior design reflects the Art Deco era when the original house was built, but Jo also tried to imagine what a small villa in a city should be like today. “Nicholas was keen for us to find a spatial way of expressing the condition of living in Johannesburg without having to put in burglar bars or alarms. The solution was to make the downstairs space quite introverted; it doesn’t really open out onto any outdoor space. You get lots of light coming in, but the space is safe, secure and inwardly focused. Then you go up to the top floor and you have this huge, beautifully proportioned space that just throws itself open to the view. We thought of downstairs as the boiler room, where everything happens, and upstairs as a more cerebral space.”

The final product has been five years in the making. “We built it slowly, as Nicholas has been able to afford it, adding bit by bit. It’s a nice way to build; things have time to mature. It’s a little like slow food. I’m starting to believe in slow building.”

Jo is excited to see what happens when Nicholas moves in: “It’ll be interesting to see how robust the house is and how well the spatial idea matches Nicholas’s ideas about occupation. I’m eager to see what’s been lost and what’s been gained; I suspect we’ll find a lot has been gained.”

Have a look at our Q&A with Jo Noero here.

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The prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Awards for 2014 have been announced and the eight creative stars walked away, not only with prize money in their pockets, but also with a chance to cut their creative teeth at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.

That’s not all! It’s full-on big birthday time in 2014 as 30 years of National Arts Festival sponsorship is celebrated while the Festival itself also commemorates 40 years of existence. Hence the caboodle of awards to the young artists.

“Quite often we have had to present a smaller, refined list of winners – this time we wanted a full slate, covering all the key genres celebrated by the National Arts Festival in anticipation of our double anniversary celebrations in 2014,” explains festival artistic director Ismail Mahomed.

These latest artist stars include, for the first time, two collaborative brothers as joint visual art winners, photographers Hasan and Husain Essop. The winner of the newly added performance art category is Donna Kukama while another relatively new award, film, went to Jahmil XT Qubeka. The rest of the laureates are Nicola Elliott for dance, Kyle Shepherd for jazz, Njabulo Madlala for music and Greg Homann for theatre.

All in all, 125 artists across all disciplines have been awarded for their shining talents since Standard Bank’s sponsorship inception in 1984. The likes of Janice Honeyman, Andrew Buckland, Helen Sebidi, Pieter Dirk Uys, Nicholas Hlobo and Nandipha Mntambo are previous winners, and are today synonymous with having achieved the highest accolades in their respective fields of artistic practice.

Who knows the heady heights awaiting our new rising stars – to infinity and beyond, we say!

The National Arts Festival is on from 3 to 13 July 2014 in Grahamstown, www.nationalartsfestival.co.za

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