What was once a farm school that stood vacant for more than two decades in Rheenendal, near Knysna, is now the rustic, homely residence of Janet Meintjes.

Janet, together with builder Richard Isaacs and architect Philip Nel of Inizio Homes, have created a space, aptly named The School, that honours the old, embraces the new and functions as a host space with accommodation for creative/healing workshops and retreats. We chatted to Janet to find out more about the renovation process.

What was the original structure comprised of and what was your vision for the renovation?

The original structure was an old farm school built around 1935 for the children of farm labourers and forestry workers in the area. The building was a typical school building of that time: two simple oblong buildings of brick and mortar with high-pitched roofs, sash windows and oregon pine floors. The vision was then to figure out how to partition the large, open spaces without sacrificing or altering the age and integrity of the building, seamlessly marrying the old and new.

The building is now complete (since July 2019) and the result is really fabulous. We added wrap-around verandahs that are ± 2.5 metres wide with steps leading up to the front of the house and one large, deep step at the back. We removed the ceilings to expose the original oregon trusses. The main structural change was to raise the level of the original school toilets (which were at the back of the one building) and to build up the space to the same level as the rest of the building. This addition became my kitchen and scullery.

What was the inspiration behind the interiors?

My source of inspiration is always colour. I spend a lot of time in the mountains and forests and knew I wanted my home to reflect those colours: the blue-greys of rock and lichen and all the tones of green.

I was also inspired by the original exterior walls that were painted in two different colours. I carried this idea into the interior of the main open-plan living area, consisting of the kitchen/scullery, living/dining room and main bedroom. Various shades of green and sage dominate the living/kitchen and bedroom spaces, while the bathrooms feature klompie brick floors, Cemcrete walls, exposed copper pipes and old brass fittings.

Do you have a favourite spot within the new space?

My favourite space is my studio – it was one of the original schoolrooms. We removed the ceilings and stripped the plaster off the upper half of the walls to expose the beautiful old red bricks. A huge sliding barn door made from Japanese Cedar opens up almost the entire front wall, which looks out onto the garden and open fields. The studio is filled with fresh air, gentle light and the calls of so many birds, including the Knysna turaco (lourie).

This is the room that lives up to the The School’s name. Apart from serving as my own painting studio, it is also used as a workshop space – a space for learning and growth.  We have hosted a Memoir Writing course with writer Dawn Garisch, an Art Workshop with Master Printer John Moore and more recently an Alignment Therapy course with Jen Rorrison. I hope to do many more.

Tell us about the original rammed earth and dung methods of construction.

A short distance away from the main building is a cottage that must be close to 100 years old.  It was originally built with a combination of mud, straw and dung and we continued to restore it in this fashion. Underneath ± 1 metre of topsoil, we have pure clay in this area. This was used back then and we continue to use it presently, together with cow dung and hay used for fodder, which is readily available from surrounding farms. These materials have proven to stand the test of time remarkably well.

We also reconstituted old bricks by wetting them, as well as made new ones using a mould and a specific mixture of the three ingredients. The floor features a stronger mix of dung and straw and we are almost at the stage where the final layer of a thinner slurry will be laid before being dried and finished with several layers of a linseed oil, beeswax and turps. There is another cottage on the property that used to be the headmaster’s home – I hope to restore it using the same methods.

Tell us how you upcycled items.

We used old lintels from the school chapel for a kitchen surface and found an old church window in Calitzdorp that we put into a bedroom that was once the school’s chapel. We also used old doors for surfaces and old antique cabinets for bathroom vanities – one of these is an antique wooden ice chest.

Where do you see the space going in the future?

The garden will need many years of work and planning. I would love to have large, caged vegetable gardens – this is a necessity because of the baboons and monkeys in the area. I already have a fairly well-established fruit orchard, but the main drawback is that there is no municipal water supply. We rely on rain tanks only, so indigenous, water-savvy plants are the way forward. I am constantly taking cuttings and growing trees from seeds but I may consider getting help with a team of volunteers in the winter months to plot out a ground plan.

Loved this before and after project? Find more here.

The post Before and After: The School appeared first on Visi.

Established in 2013 by Dave Hakkens, Precious Plastic is a global project that aims to find a solution to plastic pollution.

Dave Hakkens

The independent community is made up of hundreds of people who contribute in a variety of ways, as well as a smaller group who work directly on the project.

Heading into its fourth iteration, Precious Plastic has created over 200 plastic recycling workspaces. With the aim of trying to boost global plastic recycling, the project began with Dave, a design graduate, building a plastic extrusion machine. This developed into bigger machines, the designs for which Dave provided online for free, so that people could build their own versions themselves.

People from across the globe have used the project to make recycled plastic designs, from jewellery to decor. You can browse the online store here.

Watch the video below to find out more.

Dave Hakkens, a former Design Indaba Global Graduate, is speaking at Design Indaba 2019, running between 27 February – 1 March. For more information, visit preciousplastic.com.

The post Precious Plastic appeared first on Visi.

Designer Micaella Pedros is repurposing discarded plastic bottles from the streets of London in a clever furniture-creation project.

“Both materials, wood and plastic bottles, are widely abundant in cities and other places,” says Micaella. “They are lying there as waste, waiting to be reclaimed by people. Joining Bottles seeks to contribute to new beliefs based on what we, as individuals and communities, can do with what is available to us.”

In the video above, Micaella demonstrates one of the many easy and functional ways one can transform something previously regarded as trash into something useful.

(h/t) boredpanda.com

The post WATCH: Using Plastic Bottles To Make Furniture appeared first on Visi.

Ace the art of upcycling with this nifty idea to transform an unwanted object into a stylish addition to the bathroom. Advantage: Budget. 

When the weather warms up, Saturday markets pop up everywhere, offering unwanted items with great potential beyond the original purpose they were designed for. A wooden tennis racquet press found at a Hospice second-hand shop can easily be turned into a shaving mirror for the shower with a little help from a glass fitter. Game, set and match: You.

Did you like this Smart Idea? See others here.

The post Smart Idea: Shower Mirror appeared first on Visi.

The trend of upcycling pallets as an affordable and earth-friendly decor solution has been gathering steam and now a new co-working office in Johannesburg – The Common Room – has shown how to make all your furniture needs, well, palatable.

Pallets used to just be crusty, old bits of wood you’d find lying around rubbish skips or alleyways –by-products from commercial deliveries. But you’d be hard pressed to find an abandoned pallets these days. They’ve all been snapped up by clever folk (like local design collab Palank) with upcycling ideas and DIY skills, who transform the bland slabs into bed bases, coffee tables, dog baskets, vertical gardens and whatever else their imaginations can come up with. The application has become so widespread that it’s developed into a recognised design trend and is now even being employed in office spaces.

The Common Room – a hot-desking and freelancers’ office and meeting space – in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, has taken the trend to its zenith by using pallets for, well, everything. From the reception counter to work spaces, and the communal kitchen to outdoor chill-out area. All furniture is built from recycled shipping pallets and designed to give each room a distinct feel.

The reason that pallets dictate is simple: it was cheap. But in this case, the clever upcycling of a discarded product fits in perfectly in terms of the available space, its function and the businesses’ core client base – students, and (mostly creative) entrepreneurs and freelancers in their 20s and 30s. The house in which the Common Room is based already had beautiful, old wooden floors and the pallets have been stained the same colour, as have the window frames, to create unity.

Single pallets have been strung from the walls by chains for individual work spaces in the front room abutting the reception area – the space people will presumably use for quicker turnaround times to get a fast project or assignment done. There are more of these casual desks in public and private spaces around the Common Room.

The sitting room area further into the house has long couches and coffee table strewn with magazines (all made from pallets, of course) for relaxed internet surfing or, perhaps a coffee break (there’s unlimited java on tap). In fact, with prices starting at R140 per day, and membership options including pay-as-you-go or come-and-go-as-you-please, the high-speed wifi, reception services, print and scanning facilities, and secure backup and data storage is well priced.

The boardroom is a meeting space with a long pallet table and a pallet feature wall encasing a TV screen. The quiet room is a space for more substantial and longer term projects – the desks here are more solid and have additional built-in work surfaces.

Overall the feeling is fun and relaxed in the way that makes one happy to spend time there, but not so relaxed that you’d never get any work done.

The Common Room, 49 Sixth Street, Parkhurst. 082 463 3288, the-common-room.co.za

Read our feature about co-working offices in Cape Town here.

The post Palatable office solutions appeared first on Visi.

The Johannesburg skyline’s newest addition is an apartment block made of shipping containers balanced on an old silo building! The eye-popping architectural development in Newtown has been customised as affordable student housing. We spoke to the mastermind behind, MD of Citiq Property Services, Arthur Blake.

Johannesburg was once known as the “Manhattan of the veld” – a reference to the numerous Art Deco buildings that defined the city’s growing skyline in the 1920s and 1930s. Nearly a century later most of the original ziggurats have been demolished, or eclipsed by modern high-rises. However, there’s a hint of the old modern in the staggered summit of the new Mill Junction development in Newtown, where repurposed shipping containers have been converted into functional, eye-catching tiers of student accommodation, securely perched on the top of a cluster of old silos.

The innovative project was conceived, designed and managed by Arthur Blake, MD of Citiq Property Services. Arthur, who is a structural engineer, says his interest in shipping containers originated long before the Newtown project – he did his MBA dissertation on “the acceptability of container housing in SA”, and Citiq had already used such containers to create a multi-storey apartment building in Windsor, Randburg.

“It’s a very cost-effective way of construction,” Arthur says of the containers. “It’s modular, and because it’s modular it’s cost effective. We put four additional storeys onto the silos in just two days; in Windsor, we had the basic structure of a three-storey building up in two days.”

But the appeal goes beyond just value-for-cost. “As a designer, I think it’s a very nice addition to the building – this modern, modular structure on top of an existing structure. We rejuvenated, upcycled… all these new buzz words in green building,” he enthuses.

“If you go and look at Mill Junction, we created a green line around the building. It comes up the south face, stops on a red container on the south side then goes into a green line across the horizon descending into a jagged edge down the northern side. It’s a design feature of this greyish-brown structure, a green line with a red dot in it. Some sophistication to a hard industrial building.”

While the Windsor building was cladded internally and externally (the latter a requirement of Council that no building can be erected with visible steel – put in place to prevent shacks, Arthur explains), the containers on Mill Junction have been left exposed. “It became a very nice industrial feature in an industrial town,” says Arthur. 

Arthur comments on articles questioning his “mad philosophy of just dumping containers. That’s not how a designer sees things. For me, there is a solid block with windows, one after the other, like a block of flats – but held up by circular structures. If you look at it in the evening there are rising lines of light, holding up a solid block of light at the top. If you’re fortunate, you see things further down the line – we can see things in 3D.”

From a developer’s perspective, Arthur adds that if Citiq “had to create this in concrete or brick it would have cost us a fortune”, but that they didn’t just “plonk four rows of containers onto the silo. We looked at how it would add value to the building, to the development.”    

Each container, Arthur says, is “not a redundant item – we don’t buy containers that have been badly dented or that are structurally damaged,” but rather ones where the seals have been broken and it’s no longer cost-effective for the shipping companies to repair [the seals]. “We go and have a good inspection, and buy really good containers in a good condition,” he says, “and then take them up and insulate them, make them structurally sound in terms of fire and all the council safety requirements.”

The containers are built from weather-resistant COR-TEN steel, designed to prevent rust, and the exteriors have been painted with standard roof paint. “In some places we leave the signage, with the names of all the different shipping companies,” Arthur says, adding that such exposed features will be part of future Citiq container developments already underway in Johannesburg.

Once the container has been fitted and insulated, Arthur says “the inside is like your garage – you wouldn’t notice that it’s a container. Very often in my company I say let’s not talk of containers; it creates the wrong perception. Rather use the correct term: modular units. People ask ‘how can you live like that?’ But when they go up into the building, they ask: ‘where is the shipping container?’”

The units, which are offered as double (shared) or single room options, are fitted out with beds, cupboards and desks – also designed by Arthur’s team, and manufactured in China – and there are communal kitchens and student areas including lounges, study areas, libraries, gyms and game rooms. The development also provides free WiFi for residents. 

citiqproperty.co.za

Read our article about the Joburg orphanage built out of containers here.

We invited South African architects to conceptualise container architecture for our local context. See their solutions here.

The post Block party in Jozi appeared first on Visi.

Housed in a newly renovated and just-revealed room, a space that has been dressed with elegant mahogany panels, gleaming wooden floors and paintwork the colour of spun gold, Vamp Collaborations will kick off with a showcase of the collectables of Kerrod Modern, a division of Kerrod Antiques. A well-known fixture on the antiques circuit, Kerrod Antiques has built a formidable reputation as being among the city’s most well versed professionals in the trade of original mid-century modern furniture pieces.

Collectors will be impressed to learn that verified originals by such well-known names as Niels Møller, Boris Tabacoff, Frank Reenskaug and Parker Knoll will be on display alongside original Kartell collectables and gleaming Tom Dixon copper shades, all available to purchase at Vamp Collaborations. To complement these coveted pieces, Paula has sourced a number of unique small collectables by labels such as Sobeit, Soetcookie, and ceramist Martine Jackson that are contemporary by nature but with a delightful retro appeal.

In the months to come Paula and Michael will continue to collaborate with other specialists and designers, both emerging and established under their Vamp Collaborations label.

“Design is such a fluid thing and there are so many ways to explore differing interests; we love mid-century influenced furniture, we love reworking vintage pieces and we love contemporary design too and there’s no reason why it can’t live happily together,” says Paula, whose careful eye and skill for curatorship is evident throughout the popular store that has become a fixture for decorators and design fundis.

From Imbuia dining room tables resprayed and given a glossy (often colourful) new lease on life, to painstakingly refurbished Sapele wood desks, reupholstered Danish lounge suites and sideboards, Vamp is indeed a trove of treasures.

Vamp sees a steady stream of people six days a week and buyers dotted around the country wait with bated breath for Paula’s Friday morning newsletter that reveals the store’s latest refurbed finds. With Vamp Collaborations heralding a new depth of focus for their business, things have just got a lot more interesting for lovers of furniture with a story to tell.

For more informatuion visit vampfurniture.blogspot.com 

The post Vamp collaborates appeared first on Visi.

YOU WILL NEED:

1 x wooden table

4 x three-ton Argus towropes (R89,99 each at Builders Warehouse)

1 x upholstered foam mattress (R499,99 at Mr Price Home)

1 x husband or strong helper (we hired Mark Seach from Hire a Husband – R200 for chopping, reinforcing, hanging and testing the support)

THIS IS HOW:

Saw off the legs and reinforce the apron of the table. Using four towropes, suspend the table top from concrete rafters and test the support, then finish off your swing with an upholstered foam mattress of your choice.

It’s best to position your swing at a height slightly lower than that of the original table. That way, it’ll be easy to slip on and off the swinging day bed and – if you take the mattress off – your swing can double up as a floating table top.

We used a striped mattress from Mr Price Home, but you can easily upholster your own. The Silk & Cotton Co. sells 100% cotton red-and-white striped canvas (132 cm wide) for R321/m.

The post A swing for your patio appeared first on Visi.