Mixed Media

The Home That Greg Gamble, Cofounder of Tonic Design, Shares With His Young Family Is an Object Lesson in Living With Collectable and Contemporary Design
 

- Graham Wood

About a year after Greg and Leith Gamble renovated their home in Melville, Joburg, they discovered they were expecting a baby. ‘So we quickly did another renovation to make it child-friendly,’ says Greg. As one half of the duo (Philippe van der Merwe being the other) that founded Tonic Design, a highly respected and awarded interior- and furniture-design studio, Greg might be prone to blithe understatement about the scale of alterations and upgrades needed. But with the second revamp complete and another baby on the way, Greg and Leith certainly aren’t planning any more building in the foreseeable future.

When the couple first saw the property, they weren’t looking for a place in the area. Greg says he’s always lived in Melville, Brixton and Auckland Park, and was thinking of venturing into suburbia ‘where you can walk out of the house onto a lawn’. Nevertheless, they went and had a look. It was a ‘charming little house perched on top of the hill’ with double gables and an ‘overgrown, terraced garden’. It sits high above the street on a steep slope overlooking the Melville Koppies – not that you’d have known it. ‘The view was only visible from one little bedroom window,’ says Greg. But they snapped it up immediately.