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.

COMPILED BY Michaela Stehr PHOTOS Elsa Young/Frank Features; Micky Hoyle; Henrique Wilding; Jan Ras; Dear Heart Photography; Wil Punt; Grace Charlotte Photography; Greg Cox/Frank Features; Mathew Van Niekerk; Greg Cox/Bureaux

From big and bold to nautical chic, these beach homes are a welcome escape from the hustle and bustle of city living.

Kommetjie House

Nestled atop a dune in Kommetjie, the family home that architect and ceramicist Emma Day shares with her businessman husband, Chris, and their two teenage children is a triumph of intuitive design. It’s the realisation of a long-held dream for the couple, who had wanted to give their children the kind of coastal lifestyle they’d had growing up. “I grew up in Ramsgate on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, while Chris grew up in Kommetjie,” says Emma. “So it definitely felt like a homecoming for us when we found this plot in Klein Slangkop eco-estate.”

Read the full story on this Kommetjie house.

Onrus Beach Cottage

The little white cottage that Megan and Casper Geldenhuys built in Onrus 30 years ago speaks of precious times with family and friends, a life lived close to nature and a deep respect for the setting. The little white cottage is perched as though airlifted there on the shores of Onrus Lagoon. At first glance it is an unremarkable clapboard structure. Sitting off-kilter on a large stand, it is rectangular, made entirely of timber painted white from top to toe both outside and inside, and has big windows – not a burglar bar or ostentatious element in sight.

Read the full story on this Onrus beach cottage.

Modern Marine Home

A marine-meets-modern beach house on the west coast embraces open spaces and a peaceful palette for the ultimate low-key retreat. An intimate understanding of the small coastal town of Yzerfontein has made Evi Elsner something of an expert when it comes to creating beach homes in this idyllic enclave. Originally from Germany, Evi and her husband Jochem lived in Somerset West for 15 years before relocating to Yzerfontein, where they established themselves as sought-after dream-house developers. Combining architectural, interior design and building skills, the husband-and-wife team found a winning formula: Home Concept, their business, starts from the ground up, quite literally.

Read the full story on this modern beach house in Yzerfontein.

Yzerfontein Beach House

Built on what is probably the most perfect plot in Yzerfontein on the West Coast, this incredible beach house actually magnifies the effects of its beautiful surroundings. The house, named To the Moon and Back, is located at the very end of the southernmost beach road in Yzerfontein, bordering on Tygerfontein, a private nature reserve with pristine strandveld vegetation. The owners fell in love with “the best-kept secret of the West Coast” after attending an auction in town. As soon as this plot became available, they snapped it up.

Read the full story on this Yzerfontein beach house.

Bakoven Beach Escape

Struck by the magnificent mountain-and-ocean setting of this three-level Bakoven bungalow, interior designer Susanne Brodnik, founder of My Place in Cape Town, sought to create a unifying design language and a bright, light, open interior. The brief to Susanne from the property’s well-travelled international owners was for a home away from home. “As a parent myself, I immediately understood when the owners, who have a young son, said to me: ‘We want to arrive at this house and be at home.’ Everything is built around that sentence. I needed to create an easy living, open plan, holiday home; a second home for the owners to unwind and simply relax as soon as they arrive,” she says.

Read the full story on this Bakoven beach house.

Floating Dune House

Architect Johann Slee’s latest creation hovers over and among milkwood trees above the dunes in Sedgefield. The name ‘Floating Dune House’ comes from its minimal impact on the sensitive and unique dune vegetation. “The footprint of the house was kept as compact as possible,” explains Johann, “by introducing a cantilevered building edge that is raised above the vegetation, giving the illusion of floating on the dunes.” During the building process alien plants were removed, leaving gaps in the indigenous milkwood trees that created natural portals to the sea views. The brief was to embrace the milkwoods, and the result, in fact, was to be embraced by them.

Read the full story on this Sedgefield beach house.

The Boat House

Designer Rhett Williams-Jones and architect Lawden Holmes transformed an unused storage room in Yzerfontein into this tranquil West Coast hideaway, aptly named The Boat House. The renovation of the tiny space embodies a contemporary coastal charm, purposeful in its intention to connect to the exterior landscape.

The Boat House sits adjacent to a greenbelt in the ever-expanding West Coast town of Yzerfontein. Due to the increased development in the area and the threat it poses to the fynbos and ‘beach vegetation’ endemic to the coastal areas around Cape Town, Rhett wanted to enforce the space’s connection to the outdoors. “It was something we wanted to be clear from the moment you step through the front door – the connection to the fauna and flora,” says Rhett. “That flow between interior and exterior also makes the small space feel that much bigger”.

Read the full story on The Boat House.

Scarborough Home

The inspired architectural design of this contemporary weekender works as a series of controlled openings that respond to the area’s wild weather conditions while cleverly merging African and Mediterranean design principles with the owners’ distinctive sense of style.

What started as an occasional getaway to the coastal village of Scarborough grew into a full-blown love affair for the owners of this home – a creative director and a surgeon. “Just 45 minutes from Cape Town, Scarborough is the last village before Cape Point – a little piece of heaven within walking distance of the beach,” they say.

Read the full story on this Scarborough home.

Llandudno Beach House Renovation

For the renovation of this beach house, architectural designer Hanno de Swardt of Onnah Design made use of texture and colour to give this outdated Llandudno villa a new lease on life.

“My clients wanted to maximise the view from this plot so our design brief for this project was all about increasing the outdoor entertainment spaces and giving the interior of the house a much-needed update,” says architectural designer Hanno de Swardt.

While the main house remained intact, the outside needed some major structural interventions. Hanno raised the previous lawn level by almost 750mm through the use of terraced terraforce blocks. “This allowed the inside to flow easily to the outside, and kept the lawn and pool all on one level. By raising the lawn level we actually reduced the amount of excavation needed for the pool, which benefited the final budget,” he says.

Read the full story on this Llandudno beach house renovation.

Vermont House

Location, estate agents like to say, is everything. And this newly built home’s position in Vermont – a holiday hamlet on the pristine shores of Walker Bay – is exceptional. Tucked into the fynbos just steps from the ocean, the plot of land on which it stands has been in the family of one of the two homeowners, Alida Kannemeyer, for 60 years. Throughout her childhood, Alida spent her holidays in the house next door (the rest of her family still does so); in 2014, she was given this adjacent plot by her parents.

In 2017, Alida and Piers Buckle – her partner in both life and work (they run a graphic-design agency together) – decided to build their own holiday home on the property. At the time, the couple were living in Observatory, Cape Town, and the new build was envisioned as a weekend escape from the city at which they could also spend longer holidays. The initial plan, done with the help of an architect friend in Cape Town, was a simple single-storey cottage; it was later amended slightly by Onrus-based architecture firm Engelbrecht & Scorgie, who also assisted with the build.

Read the full story on this Vermont House.

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The post Dreamy Local Beach Houses appeared first on Visi.

WORDS Annette Klinger PHOTOS Jan Ras PRODUCTION Mark Serra 

Architectural salvage – the practice of sourcing materials from demolitions and repurposing them for new builds – can be many things. Sustainable? Certainly: it diverts waste from landfill and contributes to a circular economy. Trendy? Indubitably: adaptive reuse is front and centre in a host of recent award-winning builds. Aff ordable? Not necessarily – at least not in the case of Skaam Cabin, a little sandstone-and-timber bungalow situated on a rocky ledge on the Limietberg mountain. 

Requiring about three kilometres of off-roading after turning off the meandering Bainskloof Pass, the rocky site couldn’t be more off-the-grid if it tried. This remoteness was both a  blessing and a curse for its designer and owner, Wynand Goosen, whose pursuit of a secluded eco-cabin was not without challenges. “Nobody delivers anything here,” he says. “We had to bring everything up ourselves. During the project, I think I drove about 90 000km, and spent about half-a-million rand on diesel – just to get stuff.” 

From the outset, he wanted to use reclaimed materials as far as possible. What this meant was near-constant adaptation of his original plans. “The one thing I’ll never be is a quantity surveyor,” says Wynand, who designed and built the cabin through a process of trial, YouTube and error. “We learnt many expensive lessons – stuff nobody tells you about beforehand.” 

Initially, Wynand wanted the entire cabin clad in timber treated in the Japanese shou sugi ban style. On Facebook Marketplace, he sourced what he believed to be 150m2 of Oregon pine floorboards, but which, during the build, transpired to be 50m2 of planks, many of which had lost their tongue- and-groove joints. With necessity the ever-faithful mother of invention, Wynand came up with a Plan B for the rest of the exterior walls, courtesy of a local peddler with a warehouse full of salvaged goods.  

“I went there to buy mentis grating that had been reclaimed from old telecoms infrastructure, to use for the cabin’s walkways – and then I saw that he had about 2 000 network cable trays,” says Wynand. “I bought a few and experimented with using them as gabion cages, filling them with the sandstone that lay all around the site. It worked so well that we ended up doing it for the entire front facade.” 

The laundry list of reclaimed materials used in the build also includes – but isn’t limited to – rejected steel flat sheets (allowed to oxidise, then treated and used for the roof, window and door shrouds, as well as sculptures); plywood from marine shipping crates (transformed into substructure walls); bamboo floorboards from a former gym (now starring as flooring and an end-grain kitchen countertop); and 3 000 old, damaged bricks that were destined for the dump. While by no means a large quantity of bricks in a conventional build, on Wynand’s site, every single one of the 3 000 made its presence known. “It took a whole day just to bring them up to the site,” he says. “We brought them up 500 at a time, loading them onto a bakkie and trailer down at the main road, driving them up, unloading them, then bringing the next 500.” 

Wynand admits that he severely underestimated the time, logistics and cost involved in building with reclaimed materials – but he nailed his self-imposed brief. As you approach the cabin from the foot of the valley, the sandstone facade is so visually similar to the rocky landscape that it blends almost entirely into its backdrop. Allowing the landscape to shine, the interior – also designed by Wynand – is appropriately spartan, echoing the trifecta of 

materials visible from outside, but in a more polished incarnation. One of his favourite spaces in the cabin is the open-plan lounge with its low-slung five-metre-long bay  window that evokes an observation slot in a very rarefied bird hide. 

“Sitting there, it really feels as though you’re floating in the air, looking out over the river  and mountains,” he says. He also has a soft spot for one of the cabin’s secret features, which is only accessible via a bespoke lift – made with reclaimed steel, naturally. An industry-first, the Fantasy Room is an optional extra for couples who want to add a cheeky twist to their romantic getaway. We could tell you more about it – but you might find yourself feeling a little skaam… | skaamcabin.co.za 

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WORDS Graham Wood PHOTOS Paris Brummer PRODUCTION Annemarie Meintjies

A few years ago, when a handful of curious architects made a pilgrimage to this spectacular 1970s house in Waterkloof in Pretoria, one described it as a “time capsule”. “We’ve lived here for 48 years,” says its owner. As a result, the architecture and the furniture are perfectly preserved, looking just as she envisioned them nearly five decades ago. Everything has been meticulously maintained, and the house has an almost otherworldly, hallucinogenic quality that leaves you feeling transported in time.

It was designed by architect Petrus Paulus (Piet) van den Berg, a Pretoria architect who, while prolific, hugely versatile and tirelessly experimental over his 50-year career, seems little known outside of local architectural circles. “Piet was a great friend of ours,” says the owner. She and her husband simply wanted “something different” when they engaged him to do the design.

And they certainly got it. Unassuming from the street, the house is on a steep slope. On arrival, visitors drive onto a concrete slab – essentially a rooftop motor court – which wraps around the building, leading to a separate exit. Distinctively shaped fibreglass canopies draw the eye to sweeping views of the city. Brutalist-style columns and heavy wooden doors with ceramic handles hint at the wonders beyond. A concrete spiral staircase descends through a triple-volume atrium filled with a waterfall, a koi pond and a tropical indoor jungle, where palm trees tickle the roof. The ground level features a small aviary built into the columns, and coffered ceilings are a reminder of the raw materiality of the structure. “As you go down, it gets cooler and cooler,” the owner notes.

Rooms float into the atrium on various levels. Light filters down from above, while expansive double-storey windows open to panoramic city views on one side, and a cycad and clivia garden on the other, blurring the line between indoors and out. At the base of the atrium, railway sleepers pave the floor, extending into the hardscaping outside. The owner explains that, originally, the atrium was designed to preserve existing thorn trees on the site, but over time, these were replaced with plants better suited to an indoor environment, including delicious monsters, philodendrons and bamboo palms.

Peter Howard – Piet’s son and a town planner who worked in Piet’s studio for many years – recalls visiting the site prior to construction. He highlights some of Piet’s other Pretoria buildings, including the Yorkcor Park building on Watermeyer Street (with its built-in planters for cycads), Hotel 244 in Arcadia, and Hantra (now Hantra Student Accommodation) and the Totem West apartment building in Sunnyside. The owner also remembers visiting Piet’s Pyramids Motel in Van Reenen.

Peter adds that some of Piet’s formative early work was at the campus of the University of Zululand and the University of Limpopo (then Turfloop). In the University of Zululand’s architecture, he combined Brazilian-inspired Brutalism with local vernacular elements. One of his later projects there – a multipurpose hall “big enough to host a tennis match”, Peter says – features a 70-metre-tall geodesic dome that combines cutting-edge engineering with the influence of traditional grass huts.

Brise-soleils – used for sun protection as well as ventilation – became a signature feature of Piet’s designs. He didn’t exactly mimic Brazilian aesthetics; rather, he incorporated locally influenced patterns drawn from Zulu basketry and beadwork into the brickwork.

Piet’s own 1960s Pretoria home in Lynnwood, built around the same time as the university campuses, was internationally published and is one of the better-known examples of his work. In that instance, he refined the floating brise-soleil panels and Tropical Modernist ideas with greater elegance and luxury. More than a decade later, this Waterkloof house revisited those ideas, emphasising the New Brutalist influence and a tropical influence quite possibly inspired by the visits Piet and the owners made to Mauritius and the Seychelles, and combining sculptural concrete forms with a new kind of extravagance and whimsy.

The house includes a squash court inside and a tennis court outside. “We were very keen on sports,” the owner says. The swimming pool features a mosaic-topped swim-up braai area with submerged barstools – another quirk of tropical island resort architecture.

Inside, many of the furnishings are integrated, including a circular bed in the main suite. Elsewhere, the architecture almost mimics the landscape: on the ground level, lounges and dining areas are defined by changes in floor height. Steps morph into seating, and seats transition into counters. The owner personally selected all furnishings. “I knew exactly what I liked,” she says.

A final whimsical touch is hidden in the hollow columns: brick relief sculptures of monkeys, representing “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil”. The owner says that they were designed to conceal pipes and services; Peter thinks they may have also been intended as a blessing on the house. Recollections may differ, but the truth is, all the walls of this house are a blessing. What a magical experience it must be to have lived here for half a century…

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Tropicana – a new Miami art deco-inspired hotel by Robert Silke & Partners – revels in a few playful games with its architecture, its interiors and, appropriately, its price tag.

WORDS Steve Smith PRODUCTION Mark Serra PHOTOS Greg Cox

You can’t miss Tropicana – at least on paper. As you can see here, the striking hotel is a dreamy piece of confection that you could as much take a bite out of as step inside. Among its mostly monochromatic neighbours, the light-blue-and-pink Tropicana looks like it’s crowned by a permanent rainbow and staffed by My Little Ponies. Except it’s deceptively hard to spot in the flesh.

Rising from a small triangular plot of land where Sea Point’s Kloof Road forks, Tropicana’s pale blue-meets-pastel pink manages a trick of hiding in plain sight. Along with its curves and soft lines, the blue half of its exterior merges with the sea and sky for most of the day, while the pink folds it into the blush of sunset. Robert Silke, founder of Robert Silke & Partners – the architects of the building – describes it as having “an almost holographic appearance, like you’re not sure if it’s pink or blue or silver”. It’s genius… and a fortuitous stroke of luck.

“It was supposed to be white, like the Flamingo,” says Robert, referring to the nearby Bauhaus-inspired apartment block also designed by his team. “We sort of have an unwritten office policy that our buildings must be white, especially on Sea Point Main Road. But during construction, the client, Signatura, said, ‘Don’t you want to do some colour?’

“We initially fought the idea, and I felt some resentment… I thought, ‘You want colour? I’ll give you colour.’ With the gradation concept, I thought I was presenting them with something they’d never go for. But the moment they saw it, they were like, ‘Yup!’”

Like the trick it plays on the eye, Tropicana also fools around with its architectural style. At first glance, it seems a fun homage to the kind of tropical Art Deco that Miami’s famed South Beach is known for. And it is – but it’s also playfully subversive. For one thing, the way the balconies on the corners alternate and come off the colour-graded scallops breaks all the rules of how trad Art Deco would employ this architectural device.

“The scallops should have come all the way to the ground, creating the idea of a skyscraper on the corner. Ours go off at a tangent onto the balconies, which breaks the skyscraper motif in a way an Art Deco architect would never have done. It’s actually more in line with what Paul Rudolph would have done,” says Robert, referring to the US architect of the 1960s and ’70s known for his avant-garde Brutalist buildings. Strip away the pink and blue paint, down to plain cement, and you’ll indeed have a facade that’s more than just a nod to Brutalism.

“We love that people love our buildings and that they’re crowd-pleasers – but we also try to get a bit of real architectural muscle in at the same time. ‘Good’ buildings can play to both audiences – and there are some architectural in-jokes and references in Tropicana.”

Tropicana doesn’t just laugh up its powder-blue linen shirtsleeve, though; in its own way, it’s all about inclusivity. “Context is everything. Our buildings are designed to speak to the buildings around them – the pretty ones as well as the ordinary ones,” says Robert, referring to the variety of buildings that surround Tropicana, from Art Deco to ’80s and ’90s Pomo, and contemporary black brick and steel. “The hope is that if you speak to those buildings by incorporating bits of them into your design, you acknowledge them, and perhaps help uplift them as well.”

Another stroke of genius was getting Katy Taplin and Adriaan Hugo, the interior product design duo behind Dokter and Misses, to do the furniture and lighting. As with Tropicana’s exteriors, simply replicating Art Deco furniture in the interiors would have been way too on the nose for this project – so instead, Dokter and Misses designed a series of pieces that play somewhere between old, new, Deco, Memphis Group and Futurism.

“I see a strong link between early 1980s Memphis Group furniture and Art Deco,” says Robert. “When Memphis started to appear in Milan in the late 1970s, founder Ettore Sottsass’s pieces were basically all retro Deco. The Miami Art Deco revival movement started in the mid- ’70s, and was an avant garde part of design culture in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with Memphis picking up directly where Deco left off. The Joburg Memphis vibes of Dokter and Misses were, therefore, perfect.”

There is some clever fun and games going on with the interior materials, too. As game as the folks at Signatura were for Tropicana’s whimsical design, the budget was still constrained by the parameters of a spreadsheet. Fortunately, Art Deco was always about being decorative on a limited budget, creating cheap forms with bricks and plaster. If you wanted “premium”, Art Nouveau was more your bag. Deco was for the masses.

Not only does Tropicana’s curved exterior represent that affordability, but Robert, Adriaan and Katy have been pretty canny in mixing expensive and cheap materials. The terrazzo tiles in the passageways and on the kitchen floors and kickplates are, for example, quite pricey – or, as Robert puts it, “reassuringly expensive”. It allowed the team to use cheaper materials such as marble-look melamine for the bedside tables and coffee tables (as decorators actually did in Deco apartments back then), as well as employ clever tricks like installing wonderfully retro ceiling lights made from sheets of MDF, and cheese-light fittings from a local supplier.

The ceramic wall tiles are another example: they’re called Project Grey, and were purchased at Tiletoria for R130-R140/m2. You simply can’t get better value than that. What you can do is pimp them up by adding pink epoxy grout; together, they make a statement.

And then there are the blue vinyl floors. Instead of the ubiquitous faux-oak vinyl go-to favoured by most developers, Robert chose a standard vinyl that’s usually installed in hospitals. It’s not just hard-wearing but, in blue, it’s also fun – and, again, it’s period-correct for 1930s Deco. “It speaks of the sea and the sky… and the budget. It’s, like, R250/m2,” he says. “That said, I don’t think we could have got away with it if we didn’t have the Dokter and Misses furniture!”

The end result of all this is a slice of escapism, which is exactly what you want when you’re on holiday. Holidays need to be memorable – and yes, Intstagrammable – something Tropicana offers in spades. “Pink might not be your favourite colour,” says Robert. “You might not have it in your home. But you would endure it, and probably even enjoy it, for a few weeks while on vacation.” robertsilke.com | dokterandmisses.com

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Kate Otten, the founding architect of Kate Otten Architects, talks about the Houghton Jumu’ah Mosque by Muhammad Mayet Architects + Urban Designers and Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil.

WORDS Kate Otten PHOTOS SUPPLIED

My studies of Architecture started at the then-University of Natal, Durban in 1982. While there may have been a few people of colour in my class, and several women, the history and theory of architecture were clearly taught from a white, male, Western standpoint and recording. I wanted to learn about African architecture and culture; about sun-baked mud-brick structures and carefully handcrafted details.

Physical library searches – how we did things before the internet! – offered little information on African architecture in general, but they did bring me to beautifully illustrated and well-documented books on Islamic architecture. And so began my research into this rich alternative offering. Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy soon became my idol.

I pored over whatever drawings, photographs and writings of his I could find, marvelling at the subtle twist and careful resolution of geometries that facing the qibla (the direction of the Kaaba at the Sacred Mosque in Mecca) creates; loving how, by building flat parabolic arches, he built vaults and domes with no shuttering, and how the colour of the earth bricks melted into the desert, defined only by a play of light and shadow.

To my delight, for my practical year out of university in 1985, I was offered a position at the office of Muhammad Mayet Architects. I fell in love with architecture. Among the many wonderful experiences I had during this time, three stand out: the incredible full-colour tomes on the architecture of Morocco that Mayet had in his office; my involvement with the making of mud-brick mosques in Malawi; and my introduction to the work of another Egyptian architect, Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil.

El-Wakil, it seemed, had had the same problem as I did – frustration at being taught only about Western architecture until he learnt about Hassan Fathy. So Fathy mentored El-Wakil who mentored Mayet who mentored Otten… Imagine my joy when, some years later, I finally saw Fathy’s village of New Gourna, in the flesh, while travelling in Egypt.

From the highway, I have watched the Jumu’ah Mosque slowly emerge, only to stop for a period before being completed in 2013. Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the Houghton mosque with Mayet. We arrived at 9am on a Wednesday, the timing and my headscarf specific so that I could gain access to an empty main (male) prayer space. The space is beautiful, with a crescendo of what I would describe as “Hassan Fathy vaults” (or catenary vaults that follow an inverted catenary or parabolic curve), which increase in size towards a dome above where the imam stands, and where you find the mihrab or niche that shows the direction of prayer.

Not Many People Know That…

The entire building, including the vaults, is made of structural brickwork, then plastered and painted white. The structure is also passively ventilated – meaning that there is no mechanical air conditioning. Cool air is drawn into a void below the building, and then drawn into the building itself through the large, hollow brick columns. From there, it gently trickles through patterned vents into the prayer hall.

Soft natural light filters from high-level arched windows. Like so many other details within the mosque complex, the vents and window grilles are carefully crafted, with much of the work – especially the timber carving – made by hand. El-Wakil speaks of craft as a way of “supporting your identity”. This is evident again in the intricately patterned and carved timber minbar (pulpit) where the imam stands to deliver the sermon. In keeping with Islamic tradition, the women’s section is upstairs, separate but also part of the main prayer space, screened by equally beautifully carved timber mashrabiyya screens. The common features of a mosque are here: the courtyard, the main prayer space, the minaret or tower, the water feature symbolic of the four rivers of Paradise (sadly now filled with plants due to maintenance constraints).

Mayet explains that Islamic architecture is not about style, but about tradition and a collective identity. As an architect, you learn the tradition and the way of making architecture, of placing volume in space. It is always the same, but varies according to context, climate, available materials and available skills. Architecture changes with the environment, not with the time. Perhaps this explains why the Houghton Jumu’ah Mosque is, for me, at once familiar and yet completely new and exciting; I recognise the tradition of mosque design, but here, it lives within a landscape not usually occupied by Islamic architecture.

I Love How…

The mosque sits in Johannesburg’s manufactured wooded landscape, the purity of its white undulating form with tall minarets nestled in the green foliage of the suburbs. I love too how the large white form catches your eye as you speed by on the highway, the minarets marking the place from afar. It has a presence in the landscape, but does not intimidate the user. Fathy speaks of beauty as a human right, which he believes comes automatically if you, as an architect, take care of the “human reference, spirituality and harmonics”. Being in this space assures you that these factors have been well taken care of.

Why The Building Matters

The Muslim community in the area use the mosque every day – but it also matters for how it occupies its place in a new South Africa. It could not have been here generations before as Houghton was, thanks to apartheid and the Group Areas Act, a whites-only suburb. Unfortunately, a vestige of this past still remains – part of the consent agreement allowing the mosque to be built in Houghton was that the call to prayer would not be sounded across the area. How sad, I think, not to hear the haunting sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer – a sound that conjures such a rich aural sense of community. I am told, however, that thanks to the internet, you can now receive the call directly to your house.

The State of Play Today

Is that of a well-used, busy mosque – especially during the holy month of Ramadan. | kateottenarchitects.com

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The post Building An Icon: Houghton Jumu’ah Mosque appeared first on Visi.

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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WORDS Kevin Fellingham PHOTOS Supplied

I would like to talk about a pair of Joburg buildings designed by Norman Hanson – one since demolished, the other altered beyond recognition. Both continue to exist as ideas recorded in drawings and memories, and captured in photographs. Had they been built today, they might appear unexceptional – but if we look at the photographs, the cars, the neighbours, the clothing and the horse-drawn cart, we can try to imagine just how strange they must have seemed almost 90 years ago. We still think of buildings like this as “modern”.

While the language of modern architecture has been shared among many architects, Hanson spoke it in his own way. It is the plans for his buildings that are extraordinary, with oblique and curved elements set in tension with a gridded rectangular order. Architects read plans in the same way as authors read books; and just as the novelist Cormac McCarthy confessed that all books are made from other books, architects will admit that all plans are made from other plans. We read into them not just the shapes of buildings, but the lives that have been, or will be, lived within them by people who will never be aware of the drawings that give rise to so much of their daily experience.

We experience the secret language of plans when we visit a building. We are led from one space to another by the gestures of walls, drawn to the doors and windows, guided through an organised sequence of visual and physical experiences of space, light and materiality. Le Corbusier coined the term “promenade architecturale” for this invention, inspired by the idea of a camera moving through a scene as a protagonist in the story.

At Hanson’s own home, the promenade begins when leaving the car, and moves around the corner of the cubic mass of the living room, past the giant window, under the oversailing mass of the bedrooms, towards a sunny inset courtyard, diagonally across a paved hallway, up a tall half-spiralling stairway, climbing towards the light, through a small door in a blank wall that delivers one to a brightly lit studio, which shares its smooth ceiling and giant window (the one passed upon entry) with the living room below, and down a nautical stair to that window, looking north across the suburban garden. Le Corbusier called the plan the generator – of form, and of experience in use. It is this way of thinking that was explained to me through the work of Hanson by the magician Pancho Guedes, and which led to me following a dual career as a designer of forward-looking buildings, and a historian and scholar of modern architecture.

As an architect, I know that every project is part of a family of other projects with which it likely shares DNA. Denstone Court would have been on the drawing boards at the same time as House Hanson. It was in the inner city, demolished to make space for the Carlton Centre. At the time of the design, Hanson was a bachelor, and it was as a home for bachelors that it was imagined. At the ground level was a car park – unheard of at the time – a filling station to fuel the cars, and a restaurant to feed the inhabitants. Like his own house, the route from the car – or the street – was choreographed to make returning home a delight; and like his home, the sequence ended with a view. In this case, the view was down Eloff Street, from a balcony approached by a nautical stair, and cantilevered out over the street like a ship’s bridge.

At his house, part of the building floated above the garden on cylindrical concrete columns, providing an outdoor living room of the type we still aspire to. In the city, the residents’ garden floated above the cityscape on a roof terrace. At ground level, the columns of the collective house were not cylindrical but curvaceous strong, shapely legs hoisting the whole building into the air. Columns very much like these appeared after the war in Le Corbusier’s famous Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, along with that oversailing balcony and the sloping parapet playing with perspective when seen from ground level.

We can’t know for sure if the master was influenced by the acolyte, but we do know that Rex Martienssen, Hanson’s closest co-conspirator in bringing the future to South Africa, took the drawings with him to Paris in 1938, to show to “Corbu”. All buildings are made from other buildings.

Hanson was later to turn away from the lyrical work of his youth to a technically more resolved and aesthetically more conservative social realism. The weightless abstraction implied by the so-called international style proved difficult to translate into durable buildings, the invisibility of details having been understood as a lack thereof. Even so, Hanson remains one of South Africa’s finest architects, setting the challenge for later generations to find a way of making buildings that are well crafted, responsive to the needs and desires of individuals and the wider society, and, most importantly, that bring pleasure to those who experience and use them. Like many of the progressive architects of his generation, he was obliged to leave the country of his birth to avoid the prying eyes of the state security apparatus.

His work reminds architects to look at the plan not as a result of a series of images, but as the core of our craft. It reminds us that architecture can be beautiful while being simple – or even, rather, humble. | @kevinfellinghamarchitects

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Through our unique Building an Icon series we celebrate classic South African buildings by exploring their rich (and sometimes controversial) histories. This year a handful of South Africa’s top architects talked to us about the local architectural landmarks they find fascinating.

Netherlands Bank

by Joshua Montile

Tucked away in the heart of the Durban CBD, a stone’s throw from City Hall and dwarfed by its imposing neighbours, rests an architectural masterpiece by one of South Africa’s most celebrated and revered architects. I first stumbled across the Netherlands Bank building as an architecture student in my second year of studies (the true puberty phase of architectural education). “Stumbled” is the correct word, as the four-storey building is easily lost among its soaring Smith Street surroundings. I stood across the street, watching people steal a moment from the hustle and bustle, at peace among the trees and bubbling fountains around its base. That moment left an indelible impression, and as I learnt more about the building and its legendary designer Norman Eaton, my fascination only grew.

Read the full story on the Netherlands Bank.

Johannesburg Gas Works

by Judith Muindisi and Monika Läuferta le Roux

Like so many derelict industrial sites, the Johannesburg Gas Works buildings have outlived the purpose for which they were constructed. The Gas Works was conceived and designed to meet the ever-growing energy demands of Johannesburg. The site plan of 1927 shows the original plant consisting of 20 buildings, but not all were constructed at that time because of the Great Depression, which hit in 1929. Retorts 1 and 2 are regarded as the most important historical buildings in the complex. These housed the machinery that processed coal into a gas form, which would later be purified, cooled, stored and distributed to consumers. In addition to the technical and functional use of the retorts, the very design of the buildings, and their execution – like the design and execution of so many industrial buildings of that era – show the excellence of craftsmanship of the time.

Read the full story on the Johannesburg Gas Works.

Dombeya

by Gillian Holl

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.

Read the full story on Dombeya.

The Ansteys Building

by Brian McKechnie

Last night, I dreamt of downtown Johannesburg. The dream stretched out across acres of grey, a mirage of thousands of square concrete paving blocks – crooked, marked with pieces of chewing gum and mottled by tens of thousands of footprints. Frantic blurs of colour enveloped me – trousers, skirts, shoes, shopping bags, all offset against the concrete. The pavers began to chart a meticulously scaled map of the city centre.

An enormous living page of graph paper, anchoring urban intersections, movement and latent possibility. The dream felt like late afternoon; the sun’s rays hung long and low, heavy with that particular Highveld luminosity. I close my eyes again; the image ascends above the street and the city haze calms. A lone edifice emerges, suspended above the fever, ethereal. Ansteys.

Read the full story on the Ansteys building.

Rowan Lane Houses

by Bettina Woodward

Almost eight years ago, I booked an appointment with an estate agent to view No. 5 Rowan Lane, pretending to be an interested buyer. In reality, I was just an interested architect – word had spread in the industry that “that house” was for sale. We had just finished renovating a Victorian in Tamboerskloof, and I certainly wasn’t in the market for a new house. However, the moment I stepped inside, I knew I had stumbled upon something special. I called my husband in tears and told him to come over right away. In about five minutes we decided that we would move the family to Kenilworth.

Read the full story on the Rowan Lane Houses.

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As part of our ongoing series, principal architect at Open City, Bettina Woodward, talks to us about the Rowan Lane Houses – one of which she’s fortunate enough to call home.

Almost eight years ago, I booked an appointment with an estate agent to view No. 5 Rowan Lane, pretending to be an interested buyer. In reality, I was just an interested architect – word had spread in the industry that “that house” was for sale. We had just finished renovating a Victorian in Tamboerskloof, and I certainly wasn’t in the market for a new house. However, the moment I stepped inside, I knew I had stumbled upon something special.

I called my husband in tears and told him to come over right away. In about five minutes we decided that we would move the family to Kenilworth.

THE CONTEXT

Antonio de Souza Santos and Adèle Naudé Santos are the creative minds behind some of Cape Town’s most admired houses and multi-storey residential buildings of the late 1960s and early ’70s (like this Kenilworth home). Adèle and Tony (as they were known) formed a powerful duo in architecture and, even though they left for the US after only practising in South Africa for five years, many architects believe their work in Cape Town is the highlight of both their careers, and that their collaboration had a unique brilliance. Their impact can be seen today in the sculptural apartment blocks by Robert Silke & Partners currently going up in Sea Point.

Adèle was born into an influential Afrikaans family; her father was a well-known architect responsible for large projects, including the Brutalist Cape Town Civic Centre. Her grandfather was the painter Hugo Naudé. She completed her studies at the Architectural Association in London. Tony was born in Mozambique and studied at UCT, then at the University of Pennsylvania, before returning to Cape Town.

THE ZEITGEIST

In South Africa in the late ’60s, the architectural spirit was shaped by Modernist and Brutalist influences, emphasising simplicity, functionality and the use of durable materials such as concrete. And while apartheid’s socio-political climate-dictated urban planning and architecture promoted segregation, some architects subtly resisted through inclusive designs. Among them were Adèle and Tony, who blended international Modernist trends with a unique South African identity, creating contextually relevant and humane architectural works.

Fellow architect Roelof Uytenbogaardt’s work was also significant at this time, with its emphasis on public spaces and community-centred design often challenging the urban layouts of apartheid, but also introducing a unique sculptural quality. His controversial Werdmuller Centre was developed concurrently with the Rowan Lane houses – and Adèle and Tony both worked with Uytenbogaardt, as well as taught alongside him at UCT.

NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT…

Despite the buildings’ contemporary appearance, the Rowan Lane houses are part of a family of buildings that can trace their heritage to legendary Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s designs penned nearly 100 years ago. Like Le Corbusier’s Curutchet House (1953) in Argentina and Villa Savoye (1931) in France, the Rowan Lane buildings contain many of the same elements: pilotis (pillars/columns), a free-flowing plan, roof gardens and ramps. But the Santoses went beyond mere imitation – they pioneered new spatial sequences that are more flexible, contextually responsive and sculptural. It’s an approach that’s likely the result of being mentored by Pancho Guedes and Aldo van Eyck, both members of the influential “Team X” group of architects who championed Structuralism, Brutalism and related urban planning in the ’60s and ’70s.

It’s one of the reasons the Rowan Lane houses are often considered Adèle and Tony’s best work in South Africa. Leading international architectural historian Kenneth Frampton has been attributed as describing the houses as “the best late modern houses I have ever (not) seen”.

The design consists of five adjoining compact row houses, each uniquely responding to the topography and vegetation of its site. The significance of the Rowan Lane buildings lies not only in the architectural merit of each but also in their relationship to one another. In a recent interview, Adèle said, “I have never dropped the idea that building and landscape had a wonderful reciprocity.” From the street, the five houses appear as an ensemble of white masses, stepping up and down, with a few curves thrown in. The roofs were planted (possibly a Cape Town first), and existing mature trees were retained to allow the client to look over the five houses she built for her children without spoiling the view. The roofs were originally planted with kikuyu lawns, but their invasive roots soon destroyed the waterproofing. Today, three out of five owners have reinstated the green roofs, this time opting for fynbos.

I LOVE THEM BECAUSE…

The design embodies Aldo van Eyck’s metaphor: “Tree is leaf and leaf is tree – house is city and city is house – a tree is a tree but is also a huge leaf – a leaf is a leaf but is also a tiny tree – a city is not a city unless it is also a huge house – a house is a house only if it is also a tiny city.” Each house is made of the same kit of parts, assembled slightly differently depending on site conditions – and when analysed geometrically, it becomes clear that they were working with strict proportioning systems. There’s a mathematical rhythm running through the entire design.

THE STATE OF PLAY TODAY

Many of the mature trees around which the houses were designed remain today, including the beautiful magnolia at the entrance to No. 2. The lane is a neighbourhood favourite, attracting nannies with toddlers from the surrounding area to ride bikes, play ball and hang out. There is something powerful about placing the front door of each house right on the street – a stark contrast to the usually paranoid South African context, where the desire is often for separation.

Living in No. 5 has been an extraordinary privilege for our family. I find myself marvelling at the beauty and tranquillity of the spaces, and the way the house flows seamlessly between the inside and outside. When I asked my eight- year-old daughter what she loved most about our home, she said it was like “taking a walk in nature”.

The unique geometry of the site and the five pre-existing maple trees led the architects to create a rhythmic, curved, glazed courtyard. In a masterful move, the house turns back on itself where the ramped staircase almost touches

the corner of the bedroom wing. Every room is visually connected to the garden. The emphasis on the human experience, designed from the inside out to facilitate life in such a delightful way, is a feat that very few architects can match, even 50 years later. In Adele’s words, “I never start from the outside inwards. I always start from the experience of people. The light, the views, the form of space itself… Starting with the notion of the human experience. Through the process of making life within whatever structure you’re creating, that’s where the poetry comes.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARCHITECTS?

Both went on to have illustrious careers in the US. Adèle became the dean of architecture and planning at MIT, while Antonio became a professor of architecture, and founding director of the interdisciplinary Master of Infrastructure Planning programme at the New Jersey School of Architecture. Both also continued to practise architecture, making significant contributions to architectural education and research. santosprescott.com | opencity.co.za

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