COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Dook; Henrique Wilding; Greg Cox/Frank Features; Adam Letch; Paris Brummer; Elsa Young; Kyle Morland; Warren Heath/Bureaux
With 2024 around the corner, we’ve decided to round up some of the most-read features on VISI this year. From luxe retreats to ultra modern beach houses, here’s a look at your top 15 favourite spaces of 2023 (and checkout our faves from 2022 and 2021, too).
Pringle Bay Home
As in most coastal locations, the ever-changing weather governs most activity here. When the VISI team visited to photograph this Pringle Bay house, our shoot began in peaceful sunshine at low tide, with the sea calm, and breathtakingly clear visibility right across False Bay. Then, as the tide came in and waves began crashing onto the rocks, a rainstorm crossed the bay, washing the crisp vista clean away and instead creating a dramatic, moody outlook.
Accordingly, this home is designed to suit all of these possibilities: it’s equipped with everything that might be required for indoor cocooning, as well as a glazed sea-facing facade that maximises the views no matter the weather conditions. The north-facing glass facade also opens up onto a generous deck, with a new all-natural swimming pool – built in a location-appropriate, raised “plaasdam” style – in the foreground.
Read the full story, here.
Yzerfontein Oceanfront Home
The barn was supposed to be a greenhouse. Located next to homeowners Jochem and Evi Elsner’s primary residence in Yzerfontein, the initial idea was to construct Evi’s dream of a next-door greenhouse, veggie garden and chicken coop alongside their home. “When the plot became available, we immediately thought, ‘Let’s buy it and build, before someone else does, and builds something ugly next door to us’,” says Evi.
Originally from Germany but having lived in South Africa for more than 20 years, Jochem and Evi’s prior address was in Somerset West. “We loved living there, but over the years it became too busy and built up,” Evi explains. “About seven years ago, we decided we wanted to move somewhere else, and Yzerfontein was the place to be. We had it on good authority from friends, and from the many photographers we know, that it was an idyllic location – beautiful and uncrowded. We visited the area and were sold immediately.”
Read the full story, here.
Scarborough Home
As the owners and founders of hope distillery, one of the first small-batch distillers of craft gin in South Africa, Leigh Lisk and Lucy Beard had grown tired of living on-site at their distillery in Cape Town, and wanted a bolthole to which they could escape every weekend. “Both Leigh and I are keen cyclists and runners who love the outdoors, and so the natural beauty of Scarborough and its proximity to the city made it an obvious choice for us,” says Lucy.
Initially, they had bought an old, abandoned tennis court in the coastal village with a view to building on that, but the prospect of a two-year brick-and-mortar build saw them buy an old one-bedroom, prefab home in the village as a stopgap. “We initially saw it as an interim house that would allow us to stay in Scarborough while overseeing the build – but we ended up loving the house so much that it has become our home.”
Read the full story, here.
Benoni House
Compact and low-maintenance were two keywords in the brief to architect Andrew Payne before design began on this project. The owners – a South African couple of Greek origin with two young children – were looking to downscale from the expansive home they’d been living in. “The owners were tired of being slaves to their home; it required a lot of upkeep, and they realised that they mostly only spent time in a third of it,” says Andrew, founder and managing director of Drew Architects. “They wanted something more suited to their needs as a family and, most importantly, a place they would not need to spend much time and money maintaining.”
Having found an acre of land in Greenfields, which they then sub-divided, the couple initially contacted Miguel Simoes of Vestim Construction, the contractor on their previous home, and asked him to be part of the project. Miguel’s only condition was that he got to handpick the architects, which is when he got in touch with Drew Architects.
Read the full story, here.
Sea Point Apartments
Situated in the middle of Fresnaye and the Sea Point Promenade, and wedged between a combination of dated flats, same- same modern apartment blocks and an excess of commercial entities, is The Flamingo. As with all structures designed by architects extraordinaire Robert Silke & Partners, nothing about this building is ordinary. Known for his love of Art Deco, Modernism and PoMo, Robert refers to The Flamingo’s aesthetic as “Bauhaus on heat”. Unlike the uninspired steel-and-glass high-rises infiltrating Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard and CBD, The Flamingo – similar to the architecture studio’s Tuynhuys apartments in the city centre and Anew Hotel in Green Point – is a breath of fresh air, with curved white walls, black accents and a spectacular glass-bricked eight-floor stairwell that makes you want to up your step count rather than take the soundless and speedy lift.
Commissioned by Signatura, with whom Robert has worked before, the brief was to create something compact and fun. “They came to us because they’re familiar with our work, and they knew we would give them something completely different from what is generally built in this area,” he says. “The development’s main goal was to be able to offer modern, exciting, fully self-catering micro-apartments, predominantly for holiday rentals and the Airbnb market.”
Read the full story, here.
Kenilworth House
You know, I counted every single brick in this house,” says architect Adèle Naudé Santos, smiling, as she stands looking around the main bedroom of the first house she ever designed – a solid Modernist four-bedroomer completed in 1967 and situated in a narrow, leafy avenue in Cape Town’s Kenilworth.
She may not actually be joking. Their modular layout, visible through the unplastered whitewashed walls, means you could conceivably measure the dimensions of the house brick by brick. US-based Adèle may now be a world-renowned architect, but back then she was just starting her career, and this was her first-ever build. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough, the client was her father, the late architect Hugo Naudé.
“My father didn’t want me to become an architect because he didn’t believe it was a woman’s profession,” says Adèle. “When I graduated top of my class in my third year at UCT, he told me it was time to move on – so I went to London to complete my degree at the Architectural Association.
Read the full story, here.
Scarborough House
“I thought I was a city girl – until I spent lockdown in Scarborough,” says South African film director Nicole Ackermann. That this small coastal village just outside Cape Point Nature Reserve in Cape Town is now her home was as much a surprise to her as it was to her family and friends. A place of wild winds and brutally cold water, its untamed beauty is not for everyone – yet it struck a chord with the globe-trotting Nicole the moment she arrived. “My time here changed my outlook and values significantly. Up until then, I was more outwardly seeking for inspiration; now I realise the value of looking inwards more.”
When the world returned to “normal”, Nicole found herself back in Los Angeles for work, but regularly trawling property websites in the hopes of finding a home in Scarborough. “It was quite a revelation that, although living here wasn’t necessarily what I had envisaged for myself, it was what I desperately craved.” So when this house came up for sale, her family were sent to check it out. “I remember my sister sending me a video that she took outside the back kitchen door,” says Nicole with a smile. “Hearing the cicadas and the sound of the ocean made me incredibly emotional; it was like a homecoming. Just like that, it was a done deal – I literally bought it unseen.”
Read the full story, here.
Fish Hoek House
As many couples did during the pandemic, Lauren Shantall and her husband Derek Eyden re-evaluated their lifestyle. To beat the claustrophobia of their new work-from-home regimen, Lauren, who runs her own PR company, and musician Derek would regularly pile into the car with their 13-year-old son Daniel, and make the trek from Rosebank in the heart of Cape Town’s suburbia to the Deep South – the colloquial name used for the slack-paced string of suburbs that hug the Cape Peninsula’s coastline. “We were waking up three, four times a week to go for sunrise swims,” says Lauren. “Covid meant that I suddenly lost 40% of my business – but it also meant that I could work from anywhere. We realised we could minimise our petrol bill and just move to live next to the ocean!”
The Mid-century Prairie-style house the couple ended up buying in Fish Hoek wasn’t exactly their architectural dream, but its lofty location against the mountain, with a view of both the Atlantic and Indian oceans, was. “It was one of those 1960s box houses, where you open the front door and walk into a rectangle,” says Lauren. “Derek and I knew roughly what we wanted to do. We measured the space, made little scale drawings and cut out pieces of furniture that we’d move around, trying endless configurations.”
Read the full story, here.
Forest Town House
The Colemans are not your average suburbanites – although chatting to the humble Audrey Coleman, now 90, you wouldn’t guess it. She and her late husband, Max, were active human-rights advocates during the apartheid years, both working for the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, with Audrey also a long-standing and celebrated member of the legendary human- rights organisation, Black Sash.
House Coleman has major cred too. Built in the early 1980s, it’s a masterpiece of clean lines and geometric shapes and, though tailor-made to be its owners’ retirement home, it’s also a piece of South African design history. “Our son Colin was a student at Wits University and insisted that Pancho Guedes was the only person for the job,” says Audrey of their choice of architect.
Amâncio d’Alpoim Miranda “Pancho” Guedes was a famed architect, artist and educator, and head of the school of architecture at Wits. Born in Portugal, he spent most of his life in Mozambique. It’s difficult to sum up such an important figure in African Modernist architecture, but there is no doubt he pushed boundaries. Known for his sculptural and well-thought-out buildings, Guedes was inspired by surrealism, African art and Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, whose work motivated him to experiment, as well as by pioneers of Modernism in Brazil, like Affonso Reidy and Oscar Niemeyer.
Read the full story, here.
Paarl House
You’d be forgiven for inferring that the domed column that punctuates Pine Concrete House pays poetic tribute to Paarl Rock, the gigantic granite outcrop looming in its background. “You’ll have to talk to my dad about the metaphors of this house,” says a smiling Johannes Berry, who co-founded Brussels-based architectural firm Sugiberry with his wife Mayu Takasugi in 2016.
Fortuitous as the architectural echo is, the concrete-and-wood residence’s design was informed by a set of logical principles that Johannes and Mayu work according to,rather than any visual reference.“We like to consider the potential in what already exists,” he explains. In the case of Pine Concrete House, what existed was the double-storey home of Johannes’s parents, Roland and Elmine. “The initial brief from them was to build a double garage – but like most projects, it grew,” says Johannes. “They’re getting older, and because of the size of their house, we proposed renovating it so it could ultimately be split into three self-contained parts – a top half, a bottom half and an extension – so they’d still be able to live there, but rent out the two other spaces.”
Read the full story, here.
Monaghan Farm House
This house in Monaghan Farm in Lanseria, on a beautiful spot overlooking a bend in the Jukskei River, began with a bold, Brutalist architectural idea – but the result is an incredibly subtle, sensitive response to its setting. The owners, Wendy and Lukas van Niekerk wanted a home made entirely of steel and raw, exposed concrete, and this spectacular plot of land offered them the chance to build from scratch. Lukas, an engineer, is a huge fan of the work of 20th-century Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, who is famous for his sensitive use of concrete as well as experiments with concrete and steel – and the Van Niekerks’ architect, Enrico Daffonchio, went to school in Scarpa’s hometown of Venice in Italy. The fates had aligned.
Despite what Enrico refers to as its “strong architectural language”, the house they designed together is nestled into the landscape and, when viewed from higher up the hill, is practically invisible (helped by the green roofs planted with endemic grasses to recreate the landscape it’s built on). It is, quite literally, sunken into the landscape to keep its presence unobtrusive.
Read the full story, here.
Parkview House
I think the sunset sold it,” says architect Vedhant Maharaj. The outlook from this house on the crest of the Parkview ridge stretches across 270 degrees of the city’s urban forest – and the sunsets are spectacular. The character of this unexpected Modernist gem was buried beneath various additions and alterations, not least a steel mono-pitched roof that had been plonked on top. “But it had good bones. You could see that,” says Vedhant, who founded Rebel Base Collective, the multidisciplinary architecture and design studio, in 2017. A little investigation revealed the home had been designed in 1935 by a firm called Small and Schaerer, who created several well-known Joburg buildings, including Central Fire Station. By the 1930s, they were known for “an eclectic Modernistic style, with balconies jutting out at irregular spacings” as one account on architectural heritage database Artefacts describes it. It also mentions that their designs “tend towards the picturesque” – an approach that emphasises not just formal beauty but also a sense of the sublime.
Read the full story, here.
Modernist Durban Home
On first encounter, House Shaw is brutally simple: a series of three-dimensional boxes, positioned beside and on top of one another on a long, triangular site cut into one of the steep slopes that characterise Durban’s forested university suburb. It is made of face brick, concrete, louvre windows, shutters and a bit of aluminium; no need for paint, wallpaper, air conditioning – not even curtains.
The house belongs to Colleen Wygers, who lived here with her late husband, fellow architect Paul Wygers. Sadly, Paul passed away shortly after we photographed the house; with Colleen’s permission, we’ve included his observations from that interview.
Paul liked to describe the home as Modernism morphing the heritage Durban veranda home – and, when it went onto the market in 2013, the couple bought it within hours of their first viewing. Designed by Hallen and Dibb Architects in the 1960s, it had been commissioned by legal luminary Douglas Shaw. “Douglas Shaw was sitting in an Eames chair in the lounge,” recalled Paul. “We chatted briefly about art and architecture. I don’t think he wanted to leave.”
Read the full story, here.
Bo-Kaap House
If ever you’re asked to illustrate the Chinese concept of balanced dualism, you could do worse than to drop them a pin at 250 Buitengracht in Cape Town. Approach it from the front, and you’re met with a textbook Victorian cottage facade, replete with wraparound veranda shaded by a sweeping corrugated-iron roof – but walk around the corner and up towards Signal Hill, and the house spills over into a set of contemporary sheds. To the left, it’s flanked by the moneyed suburb of Tamboerskloof, with the historically Cape Malay area of the Bo-Kaap to the right. Inside, the house is split neatly down the middle into two almost identical, self-contained double-storey residences – one with a view of Table Mountain, which can be seen through a bespoke conservatory; the other looking out onto Carisbrook Street, and the Bo-Kaap and CBD beyond it.
“Our clients, Fred Durow and Ben Schoeman, are city planners, and bought the property with the idea of creating a double dwelling and work-from-home opportunity, as well as the option to generate rental income,” says Antony Abate, director at Team Architects. “We wanted to maximise the site’s potential, while being true to our ethics and beliefs in terms of urban design, contextual fit, scale and interaction with the streets,” adds Fred.
Read the full story, here.
Tulbagh House
It was six years ago, while exploring a “potential art project” in the small Western Cape town of Tulbagh, that Abigail Rands stumbled on this remarkable building. Her family owns a wine farm nearby, so she feels a strong connection to the area; and besides, she says, “I like beautiful architecture, raw materials and good art.” And this house had all three in bucketloads.
It is one of the oldest buildings in the town – the first monastery and mission school established in 1797 – and its distinctive gables, thick whitewashed walls, wooden rafters and thatched roof were the very embodiment of traditional Cape Winelands architecture. More recently, however, the artist Christo Coetzee lived there from the 1970s until his death at the turn of the century. For a time afterwards, the house was a museum dedicated to his life and work.
“A friend of Christo’s took us around and told us stories about each artwork. Everything I took in that day stayed with me,” says Abigail – and it wasn’t long before she came back. This time, she’d had an idea: she wanted to turn the house into a retreat of sorts; a place where, as she puts it, “you can let go and connect with how you really feel”. Later, her vision came to include a yoga studio in the old monastery building (which had once served as Coetzee’s studio).
Red the full story, here.
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