The Farm Kitchen

This mysterious little barn-like building on a farm in the Cradle of Humankind im Gauteng-essentially a kitchen with an accompanying organic vegetable garden-was hand crafted over four years reusing salvaged materials

- GRAHAM WOOD

What would the opposite of a folly be? A building that is not purely decorative, but certainly not entirely practical? An architectural experiment that is less about frivolity, and more a serious attempt to answer questions about how we ought to build (and, indeed, live)?

Whatever it is, the De Wit family spent four years exploring what the answer might be on their farm in the Cradle of Humankind, northwest of Johannesburg. Lee, his wife, Lauren, and their son, Leo, have even ended up living in the result for a time to test out and refine their ideas.

When the De Wit family moved to the farm more than a decade ago, people had lived and worked on the land for more than a century, and it bore the scars. Now, large sections of communal lands shared with neighbouring farms form a nature reserve. Where the farms converge, there is a remarkable sculpture park set in landscaped gardens, home to an artist residency.

Caught between a purely natural landscape and a purely artistic one – and, on top of that, set on the grounds of humanity’s earliest known origins – the land on which the family lives can’t help but pose some profound questions.

The original farmhouse near some sheds, where Lee’s grandfather lived for a time, got him thinking. It wasn’t the kind of spot you could return to nature. It wasn’t beautiful, of any architectural merit or historical value. Still, it didn’t make sense simply to demolish it for those reasons alone. “What do you do with that?”

What is now known as ‘The Farm Kitchen’ is an attempt to answer that very question, with “quite a philosophical sort of idea”.