This sleek yet laid-back modular-design cabin is the perfect place for a Cape Town couple and their young daughter to create a lifetime of holiday memories.

WORDS Robyn Alexander/Bureaux PRODUCTION Sven Alberding PHOTOS Warren Heath/Bureaux

Having spent a large portion of their teenage years surfing along the overberg coastline, Nathalie Ammann and her husband John Blignaut know Pringle Bay very well. Just over an hour’s drive from Cape Town, in a pristine, protected natural area, this tiny coastal hamlet is where they chose to build their recently completed holiday cottage, dubbed the TinTin Cabin.

The couple have always enjoyed exploring the area on holidays away from their daily routine, where John is a fractional business developer and Nathalie manages her family’s farm, Rozendal, and makes an award-winning range of botanical vinegars. In 2018, after a weekend of hiking the nearby Kogelberg mountains, they decided to look at properties in Pringle Bay “on a bit of a whim”, says Nathalie. “It started with a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves – and a small budget.”

A property came on the market that met most of their criteria – budget, walking distance from the beach, a large plot filled with indigenous fynbos – and, says Nathalie, “The plan was always to build within five years of buying the land, while our daughter Amelia was still young enough to spend her childhood there making beautiful memories.” During the lockdowns in 2020, after deciding that a modular, prefabricated cabin was best suited to their budget and aesthetic preference, Nathalie and John decided to go with Cape Town-based company Mobile Maisonette, helmed by architect Jed Kritzinger. “We liked the simplicity of the Mobile Maisonette design, and the fact that their Farmhouse Cabin was bigger than many of the other modular cabins available,” says Nathalie. “It was within our budget, and we could make modifications to the interiors too.”

Despite being Mobile Maisonette’s very first commissioning client, everything went relatively smoothly. Working with Jed “was a pleasure – he brought a lot of experience” to the process, says Nathalie, adding that the construction team, from JNA Group, were also professional and efficient. The build commenced in August 2022 and was completed by mid-December.

“Doing the interiors ourselves gave us an opportunity to have a bit of fun and create something very
different from our home,” says Nathalie. The idea was to “drench the cabin in colour”, although making decisions about which shades to select and just how bold to go with them led to lengthy discussions. “I tend to be conservative, and John pushes us to have more fun,” she says. In the end, “Our concept was how the ocean and fynbos worlds reflect each other in colour and form – hence the misty greens and peachy corals,” Nathalie explains. The result, which combines a contemporary look with a restful feel, speaks for itself.

The plot on which the cabin is set is large – 913m2 – and one of the couple’s ongoing pleasures is working on their striking, fully indigenous garden. “We still feel that we would like even more privacy, so we aim to create a real sanctuary of fynbos,” says Nathalie. “We’ve planted keurbooms, camphor bushes, leucadendrons and wild olives to make a berm that mimics what grows here naturally.”

There are just two footpaths through the garden: one winds towards the cabin past a Searsia glauca – a shrub-like, indigenous tree that John and Nathalie have been carefully shaping to provide the ideal climbing zone for Amelia; the other leads down to the beach. There’s so much to explore, both close by in the garden and at the shoreline, and in the area surrounding Pringle Bay – so it’s no wonder that Amelia, Nathalie and John now spend a large portion of their downtime at the cabin. “We like to come here during school holidays, and at least once a month for a weekend as well, as it’s just a beautiful one-hour drive along the coast from our home,” says Nathalie.

Foraging for wild mussels on the rocks at the nearby beach is a regular pastime too. “We also spend Christmas here in December, as John’s family – with a multitude of Amelia’s cousins – are in Pringle Bay at this time.” With the cabin’s laid-back style, effortlessly relaxed appeal and unique natural setting, it’s easy to imagine the many wonderful times this young family will share here together in the years to come. tintincabin | mobilemaisonette.com

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With 2024 around the corner, we’ve decided to round up some of the most-read features on VISI this year. From luxe retreats to ultra modern beach houses, here’s a look at your top 15 favourite spaces of 2023 (and checkout our faves from 2022 and 2021, too).

Pringle Bay Home

As in most coastal locations, the ever-changing weather governs most activity here. When the VISI team visited to photograph this Pringle Bay house, our shoot began in peaceful sunshine at low tide, with the sea calm, and breathtakingly clear visibility right across False Bay. Then, as the tide came in and waves began crashing onto the rocks, a rainstorm crossed the bay, washing the crisp vista clean away and instead creating a dramatic, moody outlook.

Accordingly, this home is designed to suit all of these possibilities: it’s equipped with everything that might be required for indoor cocooning, as well as a glazed sea-facing facade that maximises the views no matter the weather conditions. The north-facing glass facade also opens up onto a generous deck, with a new all-natural swimming pool – built in a location-appropriate, raised “plaasdam” style – in the foreground.

Read the full story, here.

Yzerfontein Oceanfront Home

The barn was supposed to be a greenhouse. Located next to homeowners Jochem and Evi Elsner’s primary residence in Yzerfontein, the initial idea was to construct Evi’s dream of a next-door greenhouse, veggie garden and chicken coop alongside their home. “When the plot became available, we immediately thought, ‘Let’s buy it and build, before someone else does, and builds something ugly next door to us’,” says Evi.

Originally from Germany but having lived in South Africa for more than 20 years, Jochem and Evi’s prior address was in Somerset West. “We loved living there, but over the years it became too busy and built up,” Evi explains. “About seven years ago, we decided we wanted to move somewhere else, and Yzerfontein was the place to be. We had it on good authority from friends, and from the many photographers we know, that it was an idyllic location – beautiful and uncrowded. We visited the area and were sold immediately.”

Read the full story, here.

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.”

Read the full story, here.

Benoni House

Compact and low-maintenance were two keywords in the brief to architect Andrew Payne before design began on this project. The owners – a South African couple of Greek origin with two young children – were looking to downscale from the expansive home they’d been living in. “The owners were tired of being slaves to their home; it required a lot of upkeep, and they realised that they mostly only spent time in a third of it,” says Andrew, founder and managing director of Drew Architects. “They wanted something more suited to their needs as a family and, most importantly, a place they would not need to spend much time and money maintaining.”

Having found an acre of land in Greenfields, which they then sub-divided, the couple initially contacted Miguel Simoes of Vestim Construction, the contractor on their previous home, and asked him to be part of the project. Miguel’s only condition was that he got to handpick the architects, which is when he got in touch with Drew Architects.

Read the full story, here.

Sea Point Apartments

Situated in the middle of Fresnaye and the Sea Point Promenade, and wedged between a combination of dated flats, same- same modern apartment blocks and an excess of commercial entities, is The Flamingo. As with all structures designed by architects extraordinaire Robert Silke & Partners, nothing about this building is ordinary. Known for his love of Art Deco, Modernism and PoMo, Robert refers to The Flamingo’s aesthetic as “Bauhaus on heat”. Unlike the uninspired steel-and-glass high-rises infiltrating Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard and CBD, The Flamingo – similar to the architecture studio’s Tuynhuys apartments in the city centre and Anew Hotel in Green Point – is a breath of fresh air, with curved white walls, black accents and a spectacular glass-bricked eight-floor stairwell that makes you want to up your step count rather than take the soundless and speedy lift.

Commissioned by Signatura, with whom Robert has worked before, the brief was to create something compact and fun. “They came to us because they’re familiar with our work, and they knew we would give them something completely different from what is generally built in this area,” he says. “The development’s main goal was to be able to offer modern, exciting, fully self-catering micro-apartments, predominantly for holiday rentals and the Airbnb market.”

Read the full story, here.

Kenilworth House

You know, I counted every single brick in this house,” says architect Adèle Naudé Santos, smiling, as she stands looking around the main bedroom of the first house she ever designed – a solid Modernist four-bedroomer completed in 1967 and situated in a narrow, leafy avenue in Cape Town’s Kenilworth.

She may not actually be joking. Their modular layout, visible through the unplastered whitewashed walls, means you could conceivably measure the dimensions of the house brick by brick. US-based Adèle may now be a world-renowned architect, but back then she was just starting her career, and this was her first-ever build. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough, the client was her father, the late architect Hugo Naudé.

“My father didn’t want me to become an architect because he didn’t believe it was a woman’s profession,” says Adèle. “When I graduated top of my class in my third year at UCT, he told me it was time to move on – so I went to London to complete my degree at the Architectural Association.

Read the full story, here.

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, here.

Fish Hoek House

As many couples did during the pandemic, Lauren Shantall and her husband Derek Eyden re-evaluated their lifestyle. To beat the claustrophobia of their new work-from-home regimen, Lauren, who runs her own PR company, and musician Derek would regularly pile into the car with their 13-year-old son Daniel, and make the trek from Rosebank in the heart of Cape Town’s suburbia to the Deep South – the colloquial name used for the slack-paced string of suburbs that hug the Cape Peninsula’s coastline. “We were waking up three, four times a week to go for sunrise swims,” says Lauren. “Covid meant that I suddenly lost 40% of my business – but it also meant that I could work from anywhere. We realised we could minimise our petrol bill and just move to live next to the ocean!”

The Mid-century Prairie-style house the couple ended up buying in Fish Hoek wasn’t exactly their architectural dream, but its lofty location against the mountain, with a view of both the Atlantic and Indian oceans, was. “It was one of those 1960s box houses, where you open the front door and walk into a rectangle,” says Lauren. “Derek and I knew roughly what we wanted to do. We measured the space, made little scale drawings and cut out pieces of furniture that we’d move around, trying endless configurations.”

Read the full story, here.

Forest Town House

The Colemans are not your average suburbanites – although chatting to the humble Audrey Coleman, now 90, you wouldn’t guess it. She and her late husband, Max, were active human-rights advocates during the apartheid years, both working for the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, with Audrey also a long-standing and celebrated member of the legendary human- rights organisation, Black Sash.

House Coleman has major cred too. Built in the early 1980s, it’s a masterpiece of clean lines and geometric shapes and, though tailor-made to be its owners’ retirement home, it’s also a piece of South African design history. “Our son Colin was a student at Wits University and insisted that Pancho Guedes was the only person for the job,” says Audrey of their choice of architect.

Amâncio d’Alpoim Miranda “Pancho” Guedes was a famed architect, artist and educator, and head of the school of architecture at Wits. Born in Portugal, he spent most of his life in Mozambique. It’s difficult to sum up such an important figure in African Modernist architecture, but there is no doubt he pushed boundaries. Known for his sculptural and well-thought-out buildings, Guedes was inspired by surrealism, African art and Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, whose work motivated him to experiment, as well as by pioneers of Modernism in Brazil, like Affonso Reidy and Oscar Niemeyer.

Read the full story, here.

Paarl House

You’d be forgiven for inferring that the domed column that punctuates Pine Concrete House pays poetic tribute to Paarl Rock, the gigantic granite outcrop looming in its background. “You’ll have to talk to my dad about the metaphors of this house,” says a smiling Johannes Berry, who co-founded Brussels-based architectural firm Sugiberry with his wife Mayu Takasugi in 2016.

Fortuitous as the architectural echo is, the concrete-and-wood residence’s design was informed by a set of logical principles that Johannes and Mayu work according to,rather than any visual reference.“We like to consider the potential in what already exists,” he explains. In the case of Pine Concrete House, what existed was the double-storey home of Johannes’s parents, Roland and Elmine. “The initial brief from them was to build a double garage – but like most projects, it grew,” says Johannes. “They’re getting older, and because of the size of their house, we proposed renovating it so it could ultimately be split into three self-contained parts – a top half, a bottom half and an extension – so they’d still be able to live there, but rent out the two other spaces.”

Read the full story, here.

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.

Read the full story, here.

Parkview House

I think the sunset sold it,” says architect Vedhant Maharaj. The outlook from this house on the crest of the Parkview ridge stretches across 270 degrees of the city’s urban forest – and the sunsets are spectacular. The character of this unexpected Modernist gem was buried beneath various additions and alterations, not least a steel mono-pitched roof that had been plonked on top. “But it had good bones. You could see that,” says Vedhant, who founded Rebel Base Collective, the multidisciplinary architecture and design studio, in 2017. A little investigation revealed the home had been designed in 1935 by a firm called Small and Schaerer, who created several well-known Joburg buildings, including Central Fire Station. By the 1930s, they were known for “an eclectic Modernistic style, with balconies jutting out at irregular spacings” as one account on architectural heritage database Artefacts describes it. It also mentions that their designs “tend towards the picturesque” – an approach that emphasises not just formal beauty but also a sense of the sublime.

Read the full story, here.

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, here.

Bo-Kaap House

If ever you’re asked to illustrate the Chinese concept of balanced dualism, you could do worse than to drop them a pin at 250 Buitengracht in Cape Town. Approach it from the front, and you’re met with a textbook Victorian cottage facade, replete with wraparound veranda shaded by a sweeping corrugated-iron roof – but walk around the corner and up towards Signal Hill, and the house spills over into a set of contemporary sheds. To the left, it’s flanked by the moneyed suburb of Tamboerskloof, with the historically Cape Malay area of the Bo-Kaap to the right. Inside, the house is split neatly down the middle into two almost identical, self-contained double-storey residences – one with a view of Table Mountain, which can be seen through a bespoke conservatory; the other looking out onto Carisbrook Street, and the Bo-Kaap and CBD beyond it.

“Our clients, Fred Durow and Ben Schoeman, are city planners, and bought the property with the idea of creating a double dwelling and work-from-home opportunity, as well as the option to generate rental income,” says Antony Abate, director at Team Architects. “We wanted to maximise the site’s potential, while being true to our ethics and beliefs in terms of urban design, contextual fit, scale and interaction with the streets,” adds Fred.

Read the full story, here.

Tulbagh House

It was six years ago, while exploring a “potential art project” in the small Western Cape town of Tulbagh, that Abigail Rands stumbled on this remarkable building. Her family owns a wine farm nearby, so she feels a strong connection to the area; and besides, she says, “I like beautiful architecture, raw materials and good art.” And this house had all three in bucketloads.

It is one of the oldest buildings in the town – the first monastery and mission school established in 1797 – and its distinctive gables, thick whitewashed walls, wooden rafters and thatched roof were the very embodiment of traditional Cape Winelands architecture. More recently, however, the artist Christo Coetzee lived there from the 1970s until his death at the turn of the century. For a time afterwards, the house was a museum dedicated to his life and work.

“A friend of Christo’s took us around and told us stories about each artwork. Everything I took in that day stayed with me,” says Abigail – and it wasn’t long before she came back. This time, she’d had an idea: she wanted to turn the house into a retreat of sorts; a place where, as she puts it, “you can let go and connect with how you really feel”. Later, her vision came to include a yoga studio in the old monastery building (which had once served as Coetzee’s studio).

Red the full story, here.

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The roofs are like the trees, the walls are like the rocks, and water runs underneath it. It is a house made up of interconnected spaces, inside and outside. It is so natural, it fools even the otters.

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” said Michelangelo. And every piece of precious land should inform the building that graces it. These were my thoughts after a rather philosophical discussion with Justin Cooke, the architect who sculpted this house in Pringle Bay.

It is a big house in a small community. And the questions that beg asking are, how does one design a building that fits into the landscape; and what creative journey shaped this house that blends into the landscape so well that even six resident otters are fooled into believing it is a part of nature?

Justin has the answer. “The ethos of my work is to bring nature and people closer together in some way,” he says. “I like to feel and understand a place to come up with a design strategy for a particular house, to find a unique fit between a building and the spaces that you make.”

When the current owners acquired the property, it consisted of an existing building in two parts, divided by a courtyard. Its location so close to the coastline meant that permission had to be obtained from the marine and coastal environmental authority for relaxation of the seaside building line so that a specially engineered seawall could be constructed.

“We came here on a day when the wind was howling,” says Justin. “We climbed onto the roof and were overwhelmed with amazement by the views across the bay. You can see the entire peninsula, from Cape Point to Table Mountain. That led us to think quite differently about the house and what the upper-level views would look like.”

The house is situated in a sensitive landscape. The milkwoods that shade part of the house are remnants of the coastal thicket that was mostly cut down when properties were developed here. “We didn’t want to affect them at all. The building was set in-between the milkwood thicket and the wet land on the southern side.”

The spatial strategy was that the home would be divided into two wings, bisected by a courtyard and eco-pool, flanked by the milkwood thicket. One of the wings is reserved for the parents; the other is the children’s domain. Two fresh-water pools are incorporated into the design: one as you enter the property and one that connects the two wings. Water is circulated from one pool to the other by way of pipes that run underneath the house, creating, essentially, one pool in two sections.

“I design slowly,” says Justin. “I spent a long time looking at the site from the sea. I took walks along the shore among the rock pools, searching for ideas. And I realised that the shape of the spaces needed to, in some way, mimic the patterns found in the rock pools.The rock faces are shaped by the movement of the sea and erosion. I wanted to incorporate the same kinds of patterns in the house. The building has layers that you have to read. The cracks in the ceilings echo the cracks in the rocks. The floor has a slightly damp look, making it seem a bit like a wave washed into the house.”

Architecture and nature should work together. The unobtrusive house on Beach Road may be big, but it is also intimate and modest. A metaphor for its owners. Even the otters agree. On many a summer night the homeowners are woken by splashes made by six otters in the eco-pool. That’s how in tune with nature this house is.

• Builder Martin Helmbold of Quali-Projects
• Structural engineer Chris von Geusau of Kantey & Templer

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A Free State farming couple tasked a young Knysna architect with the renovation of their cheerless holiday home and were pleasantly surprised to find that he genuinely walked the talk – with the spiders and baboons too.

Give architect Guillaume Pienaar a renovation project and you’ll soon find him a happy camper – sleeping bag and all – in the empty house, before he even puts pencil to paper. Things were no different when Guillaume was approached by a Free State farmer and his wife to jack up their small holiday house in Pringle Bay and make the utmost of its double-sided views of mountain and sea.

So, Guillaume took along his drawing tools, packed good coffee and got to know the square little face brick inside out: the good, the bad and the ugly. He woke up with the birds every morning, stood on the stoep with his cuppa, and scoured the landscape for the tell-tale signs of its relationship with nature. How the wind blew was vital; how the sun managed its way around the mountain too, which he examined while plotting and planning around the 2 448 square-metre fynbos erf in order to heed the light at the best angles and times.

The couple’s only other requisite was lots of space: for braaiing and visiting with their ever-expanding brood of children and grandchildren.

No man’s an island though and pretty soon Guillaume’s holistic approach of simply and beautifully solving all of the home’s design challenges (including its furniture and fittings) included the approval of his only partner during his recce: a rain spider. Would this eight-legged occupant deem his work good enough to still stick around afterwards, he wondered?

Not all that’s wild was welcome during the house-building scheme of things, however. Keeping Pringle Bay’s ballsy baboons and their families’ fingers out of the kitchen was a task Guillaume took on with gusto. He had the outsized glass sliding door, leading from the kitchen to the wooden deck outside, fitted with 150cm-wide aluminium frames.

It remains rock solid in the wind and is too heavy for a pesky primate to slide across and slip inside. What’s more, leave this door open during hot summer months and simply glide a separate aluminium shutter across to have free-flowing air while resting assured.

All of the house’s windows are fitted with heavy-duty latches, and although they open wide enough for circulation, the gaps are too narrow for even the tiniest of hairy thieves to squeeze through. To further ensure constant ventilation, Guillaume had small top windows fitted to all the bedroom and bathroom door frames. Balau wooden shutters also double up as a dramatic front facade while allowing the cool sea air inside.

Back to what happened to the face brick… Guillaume expanded and transformed the original three-bedroom, one-bathroom house to have five bedrooms, three en suite. He designed everything, from the wooden beds with their pull-out drawers to the benches and window shutter designs. 

This private part of the house he smartly connected to the living area with an angled extension, doubling up as a bright storage space where glass sliding doors open onto a protected mountainside courtyard.

The extension leads straight into the expansive living space the family wanted, complete with a ginormous inside braai. Here, the views are all-round breathtaking: eat at the extra-long table in the kitchen while having a close encounter with the mountain cliffs and fynbos through the paned windows, or cosy up in a chair in the lounge area and gaze out over the blue sea yonder.

Total family holiday satisfaction with space and views for Africa… Mind you, a certain rain spider also gave it the nod. 

His perching spot? Ask Guillaume. 

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For an adventurous couple who spent their vacations crisscrossing the globe, a one-spot holiday-stop seemed inconceivable. Until two little boys came along and the new family needed a sanctuary.

Kathinka and Pieter van Eeden never wanted a holiday home. In the years after their wedding these nature lovers were happy-go-lucky globetrotters. From the highest peaks in Patagonia to sea-level Sardinia in the Mediterranean, not to mention the very tip of the south of France, they soaked up the heady sights and sounds of foreign places.

Yet, through all of their adventures, the times they treasured most were the sense of quiet in places of worship – the monasteries, chapels and retreats. It was this feeling that Kathinka wanted to capture when she and Pieter decided to hang up their walking boots and build a holiday home – when their family of two became a family of four after their twin boys, Jan and Milan, were born.

Her small sons also sparked childhood memories for Kathinka, of her family home in Germany, special moments she wanted her sons to experience too.

So, with a holiday sanctuary agreed on, practicalities were next. The house had to be built on a plot not too far from Cape Town and it had to be done in an ecofriendly way, with solar panels for lighting, and gas for cooking and heating. Costs were also to be kept low.

They chose an erf in Pringle Bay minutes from the beach bustle yet tucked away among large trees and plants, and called  in architect Etienne Bruwer of Greenhaus Architects and builder Calvin Murphy.  Etienne had designed their home in Constantia 10 years before and, just like then, his understanding of their priorities and style, as well as his über-green credentials, spoke to their environmentally passionate hearts.

Etienne explains the economies of the design: “By using a long house or fisherman’s cottage as an archetype, the plan becomes extendable. The roof provides attic space, which can almost double the floor area, leaving the inside footprint small.”

North-facing windows maximise natural heating from the sun and offer protection from the southeaster. A front veranda enclosed by stable-like wooden doors, which can be completely closed off from the extended open stoep, further ward off the Cape’s weather volatilities.

Inside, all the walls are clad with a mixture of white cement and washed local sand. In the open-plan living, dining and kitchen area, the walls stretch up all the way into the two loft rooms on either side of the double- volume space. The expansiveness of the dune-coloured walls instills a sense of cool and calm, says Kathinka: “It’s soothing after a day in the glare of the sun and the sea. Like a chapel.”

The living area is flanked on both sides by contained units comprising two bedrooms, a bathroom and a loft room, accessible by a ladder. These separate spaces make it convenient for more than one family to stay over, while leaving the central living area for gathering, eating and socialising.

“The Van Eedens loathe ostentation; they value simplicity and quality, as is evident in their selection of a few special, functional items: a decent stove, heating plant and washable paints,” says Etienne “yet, nothing’s too precious for dogs, children and surfers.”

This minimalist approach is also clear in their decor choices, the extent of which entails a few small black candleholders on walls, and gatherings of felt rabbits on beds and tables, some disguised as tea cosies. The rabbits Kathinka collected from Karen Platje over the years who “has the most amazing felting studio in Stellenbosch”.

This sense of stripped quietness allows  for singular objects to come into their own, like the antique medicine cabinet Kathinka bought at Onsite Gallery in Cape Town, two felt lampshades in the dining area (from I Felt Like It) and a tiny wooden cupboard in a corner, rescued from her father-in-law’s garage. Two green vintage leather chairs perch proudly in the sunny lounge overlooking the Kogelberg Mountains, and burglar bars from Rust & Roses twine like leafy stencils across some of the windows.

Stepping outside, through the veranda’s stable doors, and on to the open front stoep, another rescue is found: an Indian daybed. It’s catching the breeze and the warm rays of the sun slowly setting behind the trees.

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“Form follows function” is something the DIY-design owners of this efficient Pringle Bay home take seriously – with a little help from Google Sketchup.

Building a house isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Designing it yourself with no formal training and then building it? Well, that’s something else entirely, and clearly a process creative duo Gavin and Karin Rooke relish. They’d already been through it twice before.

This house, however, posed more of a challenge than their previous projects. For starters, it was 1 500km away from their home in Joburg, where they run an art gallery and advertising agency.

Normally the couple wouldn’t have considered anything more than a two-hour drive away, but with Lanseria close-by, affordable domestic flights and a final, spectacular one-hour drive from Cape Town, they decided that it was indeed viable to have a weekend house in Pringle Bay. It’s a place that holds fond memories for them from their varsity days in Cape Town and also one where Liam, nine, and Reegan, seven, can play freely.

A few years ago, while on holiday there, they decided to look for a suitable plot to buy. It took them a day and a half of hunting. When the estate agent dismissed this particular piece of land – “You don’t want that, it’s an unusual shape” – their interest was piqued.

They like unusual. The plot was indeed an odd-shaped diamond with an old fisherman’s shack on it. It was also a hop, skip and a jump from the only north-facing beach in South Africa, and more affordable as nobody seemed to want it, so the decision was made.

The result of severe constraints

Gavin didn’t have a picture of his perfect house in mind when he started the design. “The house’s aesthetics are a result of the severe constraints presented by the weather, the site and the corroding sea air. How it worked would determine what it looked like,” he says.

The constraints were indeed rigorous. The number one consideration was the wind. In summer, a not-unpleasant southeasterly blows, but it is winter’s harsh northwesterly that poses the main problem.

“Here, you have to figure out how to keep the roof down, not up,” he laughs. “Then there’s the sea. It usually destroys what it touches, whereas we wanted something that would improve as it weathered.”

There were also the Cape-specific restrictions of using cavity walls to insulate against water and wind, the house’s restricted footprint within the site’s unusual shape, and the need to maximise sea and mountain views. The couple decided on four bedrooms, each with its own en-suite bathroom, and Gavin set about creating their holiday home.

He believes in solving problems at point of design, not during construction, and gained a solid understanding of wind, light heating and cooling by reading up on how to make the most of the elements, specifically Sun, Wind and Light by G.Z. Brown and Mark DeKay (John Wiley & Son, 2001). He also made use of local knowledge by asking neighbours about wind conditions.

And so, with the help of logic and Google SketchUp, which allowed him to visualise his design in 3D (see page 152), Gavin designed a house that met all the requirements. One major issue still had to be addressed though, and that was distance. “With the Cape’s weather and contractors notoriously unpredictable, and the average build lasting two to three years, we knew there was no way we could supervise from Joburg,” says Karin.

So they called in project manager Honor Breyer-Menke. “There was an instant understanding between us,” adds Gavin. “She knew what we wanted and followed through exactly. Her assistance in getting council approval, sourcing the best local contractors and being on site every working day was invaluable.” Foundation to occupation took only 38 weeks – an astounding feat, even more so because the building was completed within budget.

It will stand the test of time

From the outside, it’s clear that this is a house that will stand the test of time. Weather-resistant galvanised steel railings (that’ll get more attractive with age), fibre-cement cladding and aluminium frames ensure little, if any, maintenance is needed. Once again, the materials used were dictated by their function.

“It’s when there are no limits that things get a little fanciful,” Gavin says with a grimace. “Good design is an ethic, not an aesthetic. You need constraints. Operate within them, and you’ll find everything works.”

The family’s three bedrooms are downstairs. “You don’t need to see the view when you’re sleeping,” smiles Karin. The main living area and guest bedroom are upstairs, maximising the views. And what views they are. Across the bay, Table Mountain; in the bay, whales and dolphins; behind the house, mountains; and around the house, well-established milkwoods and fynbos.

From the kitchen, a huge unadorned window looks out to sea. Glass panels under the raised roof let the sky in even further. There’s a deck facing the sea, and one overlooking the mountains, thereby ensuring an outdoor living space regardless of prevailing wind, while the huge doors allow for what Australians call a dog run – an open space allowing breezes into the house – so no air-conditioning is needed.

“The true design achievement of the house is that it is totally wind-efficient,” confirms Gavin.

He once again used logic and Google SketchUp to design most of the furniture and light fittings inside. As a result, everything fits seamlessly into the overall look of the house. Even the military palette of grey and brown fabric and paint blends in with the building materials used, and with the sea and sky.

The overall result? A truly beautiful holiday home. “You find it beautiful?” Gavin looks puzzled. “I think it just is what it is.”

Gavin and Karin Rooke: inside@rookegallery.com, www.rookegallery.com

First published in VISI 38. See more of our favourite beach houses online and buy the Endless Summer edition of VISI for the ultimate beach house collection.

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