Verandah House

– Gauteng –

This Gauteng grasslands house is an updated version of the classic “Transvaal Verandah House’, a colonial typology which worked beautifully in the South African climate. Here, the verandah itself structures the house, its frames strung out along a distended curve. This is another building which talks of experiential scales, horizontalities and horizons. The curve plays with a constant pre-occupation of mine, that of living in the boundary between inside and outside. Experiencing the exterior of a building while being ‘inside’ is an experiential/spatial device that can induce this feeling of ‘boundary tension’. Rainwater collection tanks form privacy screens. Also, as is quite usual with me, the final form of the building is very close to the original design renders presented to my client.

Residential Projects

Container House / Cuilidh / Verandah House / Dunkeld House / Sea House / Little Cliff House / Cocoon House / Fynbos House / Anti-estate House / First House / Watershed / Hyde Park House / Dual Vision House / House / Nostalgia / Melville Vaults / Bara House / Folding Lofts / Vredehoek Lofts / Somerset House School / Loop House / Floodline House / Dune House / Cintsa House / Bantry Bay House

Cuilidh

– Walker Bay –

Cuilidh is built into the undulating landscape of ancient dune formation along the coast of Walker Bay. The building assumes a low lying, curvaceous form which bends with the land, arms extended into it. Interior levels dip and rise into the contour: the space of the future living room was ‘felt’ already as we stood on the naked site. Lined in timber, the living room element shapes the flows and pooling of movement through the house. Interior and exterior experiences are set into mutual play as the exterior of the house is very often seen from the interior. Conversely, ocean and fynbos horizons are uninterrupted by the house, which attempts to reproduce a kind of horizontal sweep, its foreground curves and shapes in conversation with the revealed shapes of the bay, the mountains further out. The shapes of the planted roof swerve and return, and symmetries come and go in reflection.

Residential Projects

Container House / Cuilidh / Verandah House / Dunkeld House / Sea House / Little Cliff House / Cocoon House / Fynbos House / Anti-estate House / First House / Watershed / Hyde Park House / Dual Vision House / House / Nostalgia / Melville Vaults / Bara House / Folding Lofts / Vredehoek Lofts / Somerset House School / Loop House / Floodline House / Dune House / Cintsa House / Bantry Bay House

First House

– Forest Town –

A new house for a computer buff conceptually occupies a small suburban site as a series of elided vertical and horizontal planes: “the backgrounds”: to antique pieces, to paintings, to cooking, sleeping – A classic Mies diagram. The fact and fiction of the design process. The first drawings of the building are very close to the finished work.

In this house the roof is floated on alternating sequences of glass and ribbed polycarbonate – clear squares in the blur – I like to think of this as like taking the top of your head off, letting your thoughts fly out laterally… Then there is a whole correspondence between bodies and buildings to be expounded on…or is it that architecture must be the embodiment of the external life of the mind?

This house is intimately engaged with its landscape, and it falls into my curved, landscape, horizon-inspired family of work. It has clear progenitors in my body of work, yet it is completely rooted in its own particular site and the character of its very particular owners. It is, for example, singularly tentacular.

Residential Projects

Container House / Cuilidh / Verandah House / Dunkeld House / Sea House / Little Cliff House / Cocoon House / Fynbos House / Anti-estate House / First House / Watershed / Hyde Park House / Dual Vision House / House / Nostalgia / Melville Vaults / Bara House / Folding Lofts / Vredehoek Lofts / Somerset House School / Loop House / Floodline House / Dune House / Cintsa House / Bantry Bay House

Watershed

– Monaghan Farm, Lanseria –

Like any artist, I find myself working within distinct modes of pre-occupation – I have, for example, modes of work which engage the complexities and contradictions of ‘modernism’, and then I have families of work which talk in curves and lines and horizons – and of course, I have families of work which work between the two.

This house is intimately engaged with its landscape, and it falls into my curved, landscape, horizon-inspired family of work. It has clear progenitors in my body of work, yet it is completely rooted in its own particular site and the character of its very particular owners. It is, for example, singularly tentacular.

When we first stood there, we looked over a grassy slope of potential – a bowl of a view, waiting to be cupped. A curve waiting to unfurl in response to the path of the overhead sun. A screen of stringy gums to the east. Behind us stood the slow upward incline of Monaghan farm, a slope waiting for the houses of others.

Residential Projects

Container House / Cuilidh / Verandah House / Dunkeld House / Sea House / Little Cliff House / Cocoon House / Fynbos House / Anti-estate House / First House / Watershed / Hyde Park House / Dual Vision House / House / Nostalgia / Melville Vaults / Bara House / Folding Lofts / Vredehoek Lofts / Somerset House School / Loop House / Floodline House / Dune House / Cintsa House / Bantry Bay House

Little Cliff House

– Craighall Park, Johannesburg –

A small house set in counterpoint to a rocky mini-cliff edge in suburban Joburg is made up of two off shutter concrete boxes linked by a glass bridge. In the summer, one lives on a large open balcony. Steel columns sway along the facades, at irregular intervals and tilts — they form a kind of rippling curtain between the world and the interior – the site is really just a shimmer of dappled shade, the building responds to the rippling movement of leaves and light, the columns echo the twinned and off-key stems of the many gum saplings.

Click to view article in SA Home Owner, Sept 2006

Click to view article in One Small Seed, 2006

The above includes selected photos by David Ross.

Residential Projects

Container House / Cuilidh / Verandah House / Dunkeld House / Sea House / Little Cliff House / Cocoon House / Fynbos House / Anti-estate House / First House / Watershed / Hyde Park House / Dual Vision House / House / Nostalgia / Melville Vaults / Bara House / Folding Lofts / Vredehoek Lofts / Somerset House School / Loop House / Floodline House / Dune House / Cintsa House / Bantry Bay House