COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Grace Charlotte Photography (The Boat House), Shaun van Wyngaardt, Cindy Pascoal Photography (Paarl Mountain Home), Jan Ras (Pinelands Home), Dook (Birdhaven, Plettenberg Bay Home, Keurboomstrand Home, Kalahari Lodge), Paris Brummer (Graaff-Reinet Pods, Signal Hill Home), Greg Cox/Bureaux (Nieu-Bethesda Cottage, Constantia Home), Elsa Young/Bureaux (Greenside Home, Malmesbury Home), Greg Cox/Frank Features (Scarborough Beach Home)
With 2023 around the corner, we’ve decided to round up some of the most-read features on VISI this year. From secluded mountain retreats to ultra modern beach houses, here’s a look at your top 15 favourite spaces in 2022.
The Boat House
When we initially bought this property we didn’t give the old unused boat shed attached to it much thought until one afternoon when we were having beers outside and decided to go see what was actually in this storage space. Whilst we were scratching through all the contents in the shed (a few amazing mid-century pieces were hiding in there!), my friend said we should convert it into an Airbnb. And as they say, the rest was history,” explains designer Rhett Williams-Jones.
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.
Read the full story, here.
Paarl Mountain Home
Standing in the courtyard, looking straight through the wide doors and over the rim-flow pool, you get a magnificent view of the Drakenstein Mountains at the other side of the valley,” says architect Erik Grobler. It’s this breathtaking view, the plot’s proximity to nature and the client’s love of natural materials which ultimately set the scene for Erik’s minimalistic design.
Read the full story, here.
Pinelands Home
here’s a certain witchiness to Robert Silke‘s new family home in the Cape Town suburb of Pinelands. A darkly dramatic front gate framed by a brick archway reading Caverswall opens onto a narrow garden path, which leads you to a house that’s equal parts imposing and intriguing, with a steeply pitched, clay-tiled roof, spiral chimneys and brickwork finish – all in the same burnt-honey shade. “It’s basically a gingerbread house, right?” says Robert, taking in the facade of the 1938 Arts and Crafts Revival structure he shares with partner Gideon and their one-year-old daughter Lilith.
Read the full story, here.
Birdhaven Home
Creating a sense of awe and occasion in a family home is no easy feat.
For David Hollis, founder of Arch3D Architects, the approach to this brief was all about the juxtaposition of materials and designing a visual feast for the senses. After visiting the owners’ previous home, he noticed the lack of volume and layering. “Each space merged into another, with no identity,’’ David says. “I wanted to play with volume here, and bring the excitement of creating a unique feeling of space within each function of the home, but still maintain that easy, flowing openness.” An amalgamation of these concepts has resulted in a space that allows for both family interaction and for refuge, based around a central statement hub.
Read the full story, here.
Modern Concrete Home in Plett
You know, I’ve been practising Tai Chi for 30 years, and in it, we say, ‘Stand like a mountain, flow like a river,’” says architect Paul Oosthuizen. Yes, he’s passionate about the Chinese martial art, but in this particular instance, he’s using the Tai Chi principle to illustrate his motivation behind the design of a very special beachfront property.
Receding into a thicket of milkwood trees on a rocky outcrop that runs down into the Keurbooms estuary in Plettenberg Bay, the house in question is undeniably sculptural, with an interplay of curved and angular lines, and the raw materiality of a concrete finish.
Read the full story, here.
Graaff-Reinet Pods
Iain Buchanan, conservationist and founder of Mount Camdeboo Private Game Reserve near Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape, took his family for an extended stay at the reserve during the pandemic. They did quite a lot of camping out in the veld, he says, seeking out some of the more remote (but spectacularly beautiful) spots to pitch their tent.
While the reserve has a lodge and other accommodation, the experience left him wondering how he could offer guests the immediacy of the camping experience – the sense of awe you feel being alone in the vast wide-open – but with a dimension of luxury and comfort. The idea posed several challenges. The Karoo is known for its temperature extremes, so “the traditional old Livingston-type canvas tent just wouldn’t cut it,” says Iain. But conventional building in the “middle of nowhere” is difficult and messy, and scars the landscape. A pod or tiny house, however, might work: a little Scandi-inspired hut, designed just right.
Read the full story, here.
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.
Read the full story, here.
Nieu-Bethesda Home
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, here.
Signal Hill Home
It’s already become a cliché to say that the Covid-19 pandemic – and in particular, its lockdowns, which confined us to our homes for months on end in 2020 – changed the way we think about domestic space. These days, walk through a prospective new home, and one of the first questions that comes to mind is how you’d feel about being confined to that house for two months. And in the case of this cleverly remodelled abode in Cape Town, the answer is, “Bring it on immediately!”
Located in the upper regions of Green Point, the house is perched on the edge of Signal Hill, and unfolds over multiple levels to accommodate the steepness of the sloped plot. Past the street entrance and parking garage at the top of the house, a short, covered walkway – encased on one side by metal palisade-style balustrades, coated in an eye-catching trio of brass, copper and bronze – leads to the main door. Inside, one is quickly drawn into an expansive, open-plan lounge, dining and kitchen area, which works seamlessly as the main living space.
Read the full story, here.
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.
Read the full story, here.
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, here.
Kalahari Lodge
Remote, exclusive and eco-conscious – and complete with tawny desert sunsets – Tswalu Kalahari embodies all the elements of a memorable safari experience. The Oppenheimer family, committed conservationists and custodians of this tract of stark beauty for more than two decades, are driven by their intent “to leave our world better than we found it”. And they are succeeding.
Two camps – Motse and the private villa Tarkuni – shimmer graciously in the sun. We featured Motse in VISI #106; now we focus on Tarkuni, and the camps’ acclaimed Klein JAN restaurant. As with Motse, an artful revamp by multidisciplinary design practice Savile Row has given the spaces a fresh, contemporary feel that doesn’t compete with the dramatic landscape that unfurls around them.
Read the full story, here.
Scarborough Beach Home
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.
The couple were so enamoured with the village, they had no desire to tell anyone about it – not even their three grown children. “It was a year before we took any of them with us,” they say with a laugh. “Predictably, they immediately fell in love with it too, and suggested we start looking for a place where we could all go to as a family.”
Read the full story, here.
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, here.
Constantia Home
“We got some very funny reactions because it really wasn’t pretty,” says architect Sean Mahoney, recalling friends and colleagues visiting his newly completed house in the Cape Town suburb of Constantia for the first time. “The exterior was raw brick, and the garden had rubble lying everywhere. My architect friends, in particular, were just… quiet.”
The house, where he lives with his wife, artist and sculptor Justine Mahoney, and their daughters Ella and Biba, is an extreme example of one of his architectural mantras – as a partner in the firm StudioMAS, he believes the buildings he designs should look their worst on the day he hands over the keys. Or, in more marketable terms, they should look better with time. “Good architecture needs history,” he says.
Read the full story, here.
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