08 Mar 2016

Fynbos House

– Betty’s Bay, Western Cape –

This house takes a design cue from the Drakensberg house. It too has a planted roof, this time, planted with fynbos and flowering bulbs. The area of Betty’s Bay falls within the extraordinarily rich and beautiful Kogelberg Coastal Biosphere, and the house is situated between the glaring white beach and great grey mountains, between violent winter north-western and summer south-east winds.

The house sits in a thickly overgrown site of the indigenous fynbos, and the ground floor experience of the house is contained within the green miniature of the fynbos. Any gardening that occurs concerns only oval cut outs into the vegetation. There is a view of the ocean at high levels, so two glass cubes emerge from the roof plan, housing a large living space, and the main bedroom suite.

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Click to view article in Visi Magazine, 2007

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

08 Mar 2016

Dual Vision House

– Betty’s Bay, Western Cape –

This house works around the idea of the ‘picture window’, primed to the primacy of the view. Instead of the usual singular focus of a picture window, this frame works both ways. Placed back to back around an architectural interior, this ‘picture window’ treats both mountain and sea with equal primacy. It is the result of opposing effects.

From the inside, the chamfered picture-frame edges wedge the views open like a wide-angle lens. Orientated between the equally vicious north west and south east winds, one side of the frame is always openable. Sun comes from the north – seen from the southern seaside, the building is internally lit – it glows, uncannily, during the daytime.

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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

08 Mar 2016

Cocoon House

– Illovo, Johannesburg –

A house on a tennis court subdivision for a fabulous 50-something woman living alone. Silent dictate of security. A courtyard house where all rooms are in contact with each other around an egg-shaped atrium – a house in touch, always, with itself.

This world is intimate, fish-bowled, bent to one’s own – the cocoon makes an interior geography, a world in which you own the sun, the moon and the stars. Strange symmetries appear. Doors slide away into cavities a la Michael Sutton; proportions are square-ish, sometimes. Texture oscillates from rough to smooth. Colour lives within. From outside, the house presents silent cubic shapes. On account of its open heart, the building almost appears empty, a frame to nothing. Sunlight glows from within.