PROJECT NAME:
House Ee
RESIDENTIAL
We were approached by the client who had purchased a property in Constantia, Cape Town, with great views and immense potential. The garden was beautiful and well-established, but the existing house left much to be desired.
It was decided early on in the design process that in order to preserve the garden and to achieve savings on structure, the new house should be positioned largely on the footprint of the original structure, but all traces of the original house would be erased, and the new dwelling would look as if it had always belonged on this site.
The client’s brief was to design a family home providing the necessary flow for simultaneous privacy and entertaining, and has strong relationships between living spaces and the garden. All the available view opportunities of Table Mountain and surrounds had to be exploited to their full potential.
Aesthetically, the point of departure was a farmhouse, and during the design process this evolved into a modern interpretation of this time-honoured typology. For the main living / entertainment area (which we called ‘the Barn’), we decided to draw on the barn or shed-type architecture often found on farms. The result is a steel-framed structure with glass on two sides (which slides away into concealed wall cavities), flowing onto a wrap-around deck which overlooks the garden.
Even spaces such as the kitchen were ceonceived as blend of a traditional farmhouse style kitchen with modern elements such as shelving which is suspended from the slab above, and backlit in order to highlight the specially selected wall tiles.
As with many domestic projects, the result is the fruit of a collaborative process in which both architect and client were fully engaged and inspired.
