COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Greg Cox / Bureaux (Japandi-style Renovation, Vermont House); Paris Brummer (Pretoria House, Monaghan Farm House, Sea Point Apartment); Elsa Young (Parkhurst Home); Warren Heath / Bureaux (Johannesburg House); Elsa Young/Frank Features (Kommetjie House; Eco-friendly Parkhurst Home); Inge Prins (Modernist Stellenbosch Home); Karl Rogers/Vignette (Betty’s Bay Home); Niel Vosloo (Higgovale House); Jan Ras (Noordhoek Home, Bo-Kaap Apartment); Alan Jensen (Schoorl House);
With 2025 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 2024 (and checkout our faves from 2023, 2022 and 2021, too).
Japandi-style Renovation in Cape Town
I don’t think we would have bought this house if it wasn’t for our architect,” says homeowner Janine Vermeulen of the relaxed, contemporary home she moved into in 2022 with her husband, Ruan, and their son, Louw. Even the architect in question, Werner Lotz of Hours Clear, initially had his doubts. “The existing house was in a bad way,” he says. “Multiple additions had been done on the cheap over the years. My first thought was no, do not buy this!”
But as Janine, Ruan and Werner walked around the garden, something began to shift. “It had potential: two large oak trees and the lawn promised lazy Sundays with the family,” Werner says. “And the building itself had something in terms of its proportions – it was almost elegant. But everything was in the wrong spot, and the house turned its back on the garden, which definitely had to change.”
The extensive renovation enhanced the home’s boxy, modernist proportions, and its exterior appearance has been kept as minimalist as possible, with the flat roofs and a series of angular volumes finished in white- painted plaster creating an overall impression of symmetry and order. The home now sports a delightfully contemporary orientation outwards to the beautiful old oak trees and spacious garden, which also includes a sleek new swimming pool and koi pond placed side by side and traversable via a stepping-stone pathway. There’s loads of space in which Louw can play with the family’s two cocker spaniels, Mymy and Mila, as well as an expansive area for outdoor dining and a combination braai/wood-burning pizza oven that gets almost daily use during Cape Town’s long, sunny summers.
Read the full story on this Japandi-style renovation in Cape Town.
Pretoria House
It’s the kind of house you barely notice from its jacaranda-lined street in Waterkloof Ridge in Pretoria. It is “very low-profile”, says Johan Wentzel of W Design Architecture Studio, which he and his partner in life and work, Grete van As, founded together. Given the home’s spectacular setting, downplaying the grandeur of the entrance heightens the impact of what’s to come when you cross the threshold.
“When you enter, the first thing you see is the garden,” says Johan. It’s beautiful, with large, established trees and terraces, and with stone retaining walls running down to the “dog park”, as the locals call it (in reality, an expanse of lawns, woods and pools in a valley dropping down towards a dam). The boundary is barely discernible, so the garden seems to stretch on forever, as if the house were out in the countryside rather than in suburbia. “It always takes people by surprise,” he says.
Read the full story on this Pretoria house.
Parkhurst Home
Rhys and Meg Ralph hadn’t intended to live in this house. Rhys, a property developer, originally acquired the derelict stand with the intention of “flipping” it. Hidden away in a quiet nook in Parkhurst, opposite a park with the Braamfontein Spruit running through it, the setting was beautiful, but the stand had been vacant for some time when he took possession and had clearly been used by local builders as a dumping site. At that point, the park was, as Rhys puts it, a “no-go zone”.
While clearing the rubble and building a house, Rhys took on the rehabilitation of the park, too.“We ripped out all the Spanish reed,” he recalls – the invasive species that choked the space. “I planted grass. I put in trees and benches. We secured it, and got rid of all the rubble.” He also added signage, bins, benches, swings and a trampoline. By the end, it had become a “pretty spectacular little park”. His efforts gave this somewhat-neglected corner of the neighbourhood a significant lift, and he and Meg soon realised the property had the potential to be quite special – special enough to live there themselves. The went so far as to give it a name – Cartref, inspired by Rhys’s Welsh roots. “It’s the Welsh name for home: a place of feeling, family, laughter and love,” he explains.
Read the full story on this Parkhurst home.
Monaghan Farm House Designed by C76 Architecture
ourtyard houses are on those “typologies”, as architects call them, that have popped up at various places around the world over thousands of years, finding a multitude of uses and solving countless problems. From the atriums of ancient Rome to Islamic and Chinese architecture and European Modernism, internal courtyards materialise, seemingly regardless of climate or culture. This home in Monaghan Farm, an eco-estate near Lanseria, reprises this age-old idea to make the most of its incredible location right at the edge of the estate, in wide-open grassland overlooking an adjacent game farm, with views out towards the Magaliesberg.
Carl Jacobsz of C76 Architecture designed the home and, in this instance, the internal courtyard had to accomplish two things simultaneously: create a powerful, immersive experience of nature; and ensure privacy. That’s quite a difficult balance to strike, but Carl found that a large, planted courtyard would invite nature into the very heart of the home, so that even when the perimeter doors and windows are closed, internal windows and doors could still be opened up, letting in views of the sky, fresh air, light and even birdlife. At the same time, the house is completely private and secure.
Read the full story on this Monaghan Farm house.
Johannesburg House by Gregory Katz
What Toni Twidale wanted even more than a house was to live among the trees. “I wanted to see green all the time,” says Toni, who owns this home with her partner Graeme. “I wanted the outside in.” And so they decided to build a house that would, more than anything, be about the site.
The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, known locally for his creative, experimental and often unconventional approach. Toni wanted to keep all the indigenous trees; Gregory’s brief, therefore, became something of a mathematical puzzle around fitting the dimensions of a house between the trees. In the end, he settled on two long, slim “bars”, with alternating strips of open space on either side and between them for the driveway, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an “umbilical cord” – a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site. The branches of the trees reach up and over a flat concrete roof, which is planted with wavy grass, essentially lifting what would have been on the ground up a level, and adding to the greenery.
Floor-to-ceiling glass walls let the outside in, especially when they’re opened up and the house is transformed into something more like a garden pavilion, the interiors becoming part of the garden itself. Some trees are so close they seem to be inside; sections of the eaves had to be cast with cutouts through which the branches could grow.
Read the full story on this Johannesburg house by Gregory Katz.
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.”
Although the couple hadn’t envisaged living in an estate, the 1 200m2 pie-shaped plot is slightly elevated and boasts spectacular sea views, with a strong connection to the strandveld fynbos biome that borders the house at the back. The design process took two years, with Emma taking much inspiration from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, an architectural treatise proposing that the world’s most beautiful spaces were not made by architects but by, and for, people. Alexander’s approach is not top-down design or bottom-up chaos, but generative constraints that begin with the environment and run through a “grammar” of building – which means the design emerges from these constraints in much the same way that a sentence arises from grammatical rules.
Read the full story on this Kommetjie house.
Eco-friendly Parkhurst Home
When James and Kate Steere bought a dilapidated bungalow in Parkhurst, Johannesburg a decade ago, they had little idea of the importance the home would come to have in their greater family dynamic. Built in 1948 for World War II servicemen, the original dwelling on a south-facing plot was not just cold, dark and damp, but also littered with asbestos, and mould-inducing melamine and linoleum. And a three-degree lean, thanks to an unbraced A-frame that was holding up two tonnes of concrete tiles.
The couple’s vision for a four-bedroom home that used sustainable, natural materials with enhanced energy efficiency was a priority, as was their desire for a central voluminous living area that would allow for expansive views of the surrounding treetops and garden. It was a tough call, considering the 495m2 plot and the couple’s limited budget. But in keeping with their family motto – Cogitare Audere; to think, to dare – they took their vision to James’s father Peter, a prolific designer, artist and creator, who immediately saw opportunity amid the chaos.
“The story begins in Zimbabwe,” says Peter. “As a child, I was fascinated by the steel barns I’d see when I accompanied my father on field trips into the farmlands, and how these barns’ functions would change according to the seasons and over time. As an adult, I realised that conventional urban dwellings tended to lack this freedom.”
Read the full story on this eco-friendly Parkhurst home.
Modernist Stellenbosch Home
A family affair is how architect Bettina Woodward describes the design of this Stellenbosch house. And it quite literally is. Bettina is the principal architect at her practice Open City, and she designed the house for (and with) her brother Roland Andrag, sister-in-law Juandi and their family.
Roland and Bettina grew up in a modernist home. Their German-immigrant grandparents had a house full of original Mid-century design and, says Bettina, “My parents were very interested in modern and abstract art. My mother always pushed radical ideas.” Bettina has subsequently restored a spectacular 1970s modernist home in Cape Town, and is fascinated with the rich vein of regional Modernism in and around Stellenbosch, created by the likes of architects Pius Pahl (who studied at the Bauhaus), Gawie Fagan and Revel Fox.
Roland and Juandi lived in a “typical Mid-century Modern house” in Stellenbosch before building this one. Add to this their love of pioneering US Mid-century architect Richard Neutra – they once went on a road trip visiting some of his iconic houses in California – and it was inevitable that what would emerge from this family affair would be an homage to Modernism. Roland and Juandi had found this site in their neighbourhood a few years prior – chosen for the views more than anything else. “We have a clear view of Table Mountain and of the Stellenbosch Mountain to one side,” says Juandi.
Read the full story on this Modernist Stellenbosch home.
Betty’s Bay House
A “meander through the treetops” is how architect David Talbot of Platform describes the idea behind the beautiful wavy edge of Kloof House in Betty’s Bay. Right from the start, the owners wanted a treehouse on the site they’d found backing up onto the kloof right next to the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden. Quite unusually for an area known for its windy conditions, this part of the kloof was sheltered by a dense boekenhout forest.
These factors, as well as the steep slope of the site – plus a desire to build in a way that would disturb the ground as little as possible – led to the idea of a house on stilts. “The structure was always going to have to have a light touch, in every sense of the word,” says David. Not one tree was touched while the foundations were going into the ground, and the team employed advanced building methods such as cross-laminated timber and a new foundation technology that involved drilling steel piles into the ground at opposing angles and capping them with a steel plate.
While these were serious ambitions, the owners never wanted to forget the fact that it was, after all, a treehouse, and that it needed to have a sense of whimsy and adventure about it. Entering via a “pretty magical” footbridge through the treetops, you’re barely even aware of the house as you approach. The “arrival sequence”, as David describes it, is a journey of discoveries and surprises, from the bridge itself to the front door, the interiors and the views. Inside, the path continues along the “curvilinear” south-facing edge.
Read the full story on this Betty’s Bay home.
Higgovale House
Invermark is the type of residence that makes its presence known to passers-by. Situated in the Cape Town suburb of Higgovale, its facade is distinguished by a pair of parallel cantilevered concrete planes jutting out authoritatively from the undulating skirt of Table Mountain. Seen from the road, the home’s wraparound floor-to-ceiling glazing disappears from view thanks to the floor and roof slabs’ four-metre overhang – a function that allows the owners complete privacy and a view that need not ever be interrupted by blind or curtain.
Architecture nerds will no doubt see the influence of Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House, a Los Angeles landmark and a seminal building in the Modernist canon, which protrudes similarly from the Hollywood Hills over the cityscape below. Like Stahl House, Invermark is inherently site-specific, characterised as much by its functional, minimalist design as by the panoramic views that unfold around it. Unlike the original, however, Invermark is the reincarnated version of an existing residence that its new owners felt didn’t make the most of its lofty perch.
Read the fulls story on this Higgovale house.
Noordhoek Home
While Stefan Havenstien’s Noordhoek residence is far from inconspicuous, you’d be forgiven for driving right past it. Sitting at the end of a narrow, meandering lane of milkwood trees, it’s practically obscured from view by the canopy. Once you know where to look, however, it seems impossible to have missed it. There, in a clearing among a grove of milkwoods, looms an imposing configuration of two interlocking cuboids in timber and brick, elevated by a collection of steel stilts – a cabin in a forest, drawn to its contemporary conclusion.
“Being hidden wasn’t the intention, but it ended up being a real plus,” says German expat Stefan, a software engineer by day and crime novelist by night, who bagged the tree-filled plot of land in 2019. From the outset, he envisaged a stilted double-storey cabin, so he reached out to a specialist in the field of timber design, architect Jacques Cronjé. “The design of the house was entirely driven by the site,” says Jacques. “There was literally only one small patch of open land we could build on where we’d disturb the least number of trees.” And because Stefan wanted a view, the only way to go was up. “The house is built up to the millimetre of the 10-metre height restriction, which is just below the treetops,”adds Jacques. “We knew the only way to access the view would be from a flat roof deck, which further informed the design.”
With milkwoods being a protected endemic species, Jacques and his team had to navigate a lot of red tape before they could break ground, first needing to obtain permission from the provincial Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning and then the City of Cape Town, who insisted the necessary trees were removed by a professional arborist under the watchful eye of an environmental consultant.
Read the full story on this Noordhoek house.
Schoorl House
In terms of windswept coastal beauty, it doesn’t get much better than this 7 300-hectare dune field in Noord-Holland – one of the largest nature reserves in the Netherlands. And it’s here that Harmen Lodewijk and Julia Fagel chose to build their home, on a slightly elevated location where dunes merge into polder landscape, with the house and its garden forming a connection between the village of Schoorl and the dunes.
Given the landscape, the choice of architect was a key consideration for the couple – they needed a discerning design that would accommodate their need for tranquillity, space and functionality, along with a sensitivity to the surroundings. Paul de Ruiter of Paul de Ruiter Architects in Amsterdam was commissioned – and the result is a home with an elongated black volume, large glass sections and pointed shed roofs, with part of the building hidden underground. “The flowing transition to the green rural environment was the most important starting point for this design,” says Paul. “The subtly hidden house has been built with as many natural materials and sustainable techniques as possible.”
The greenhouse shape of the three-part roof catches the eye from afar, its appearance the result of both the desired orientation towards the sun and local building aesthetics. “The surroundings of the villa are characterised by historic allotments, watercourses and roads, mills and farms,” says Paul. “There are few contemporary homes in the empty polder landscape, so we needed to incorporate the house’s appearance into the wider environment.”
Read the full story on the Schoorl House.
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.
Sea Point Apartment
Step out of the elevator on La Camargue’s top floor, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve been teleported, not lifted. Instead of walking into the penthouse of this Sea Point apartment block, you’re welcomed into the cabin of what appears to be a superyacht. The long, rectangular space, angled windows, high-gloss wooden panelling, slabs of marble and curved walls are all classic signatures of luxury nautical design – and if there’s any lingering doubt, the windows are filled with the uninterrupted blue of the Atlantic Ocean. To your right is a sweeping staircase that ascends to what is, for all intents and purposes, the vessel’s upper deck. There, at your feet, is maritime-quality wooden decking – and above your head, nothing but open skies and sunshine. You can see the ocean and feel its breezes on your cheeks. Clearly the science of teleportation does exist – and you’ve just experienced it.
Well, there’s good news and bad news. Unfortunately, teleportation has yet to be invented, and you’re not on a yacht. You are, however, privileged to be experiencing a unique duplex apartment designed for a client by Ben Kotlowitz and his team at KAA Architects. The duplex had belonged to the parents of Ben’s client and, over the years since he’d taken ownership, he and Ben had mulled over how to renovate it from something Austin Powers would have loved into a unique expression of contemporary luxury. “We talked about the project for four or five years,” says Ben. “He would call me up and say, ‘Let’s have another look at it to see what we can come up with.’ He owns a boat too, and we would sit up here discussing what it feels like to look out at the sea from the deck of a superyacht. So, yes – we used seagoing vessels as inspiration, and incorporated how the spaces would work and what the flow would be.”
Read the full story on this Sea Point apartment.
Bo-Kaap Apartment
It’s difficult not to be impressed by the view that greets you as you enter this top-floor, double-volume apartment. Even more difficult is deciding exactly what’s impressing you the most – the view, the architecture, the art, or the furniture.
It’s impossible to avoid the uninterrupted vista of Table Mountain through the floor-to-ceiling window, but even that can only hold your eye for a moment or two before you wonder at the expanse of off-shutter concrete and black metal catwalk above your head. Echoing the exterior’s asymmetrical boxiness, the inside of this apartment may be all right angles, but there’s certainly no square-matrix uniformity to the space.
Then you take in the 40-plus artworks – the paintings and large framed photographs in bright reds, yellows, greens and neons; the sculptures that sit on various tables. Some of the artists you may recognise – Zander Blom, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Conrad Botes, Jacob van Schalkwyk, Edoardo Villa, Claudette Schreuders, Pieter Hugo. Other pieces are just as strong, but the artists are unfamiliar.
Read the full story on this Bo-Kaap apartment.
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