LIVING CANVAS

The richly detailed 1930s Cape Town apartment of artist Rodan Kane Hart and interior curator Maybe Corpaci is an ongoing experiment in design, art and life.

As a sculptor and an interior curator, it was inevitable that Rodan Kane Hart and his partner Maybe Corpaci would treat their home as something of an experimental space. It's a constantly evolving creative outlet for their ideas and collections of art and design, as much as it is a home, studio and refuge.

It's on the sixth floor - the very top of a 1930s building in Cape Town's CBD, originally built for a shipping company. Its polished granite plinth, ornate turret, and richly decorated cornice speak of an era of opulence and prosperity. The black and white marble entrance hall leads to a teak-paneled shipping room and boardrooms with plaster ceilings. Arched doorways and parquet floors characterise Rodan and Maybe's apartment. They were attracted as much by the grandeur of the spaces and volumes, which would allow Rodan enough space to have his studio at home, as by the period detailing. Before moving here, he'd always relied on industrial buildings to provide the space he needed to work as a sculptor and create the architectural steel forms he's known for.

Rodan began collecting furniture when he was in his 20s. "I'd sell a few artworks and buy furniture," he says. His gradually expanding collection of largely mid-century pieces worked well in the warehouse-esque lofts he'd occupied before moving here but has since found fresh expression in this rather different kind of commercial space. Maybe adds, however, that the apartment

"The root of his interest in collecting furniture stems from his notion of furniture as functional art - a practical manifestation of what he explores through sculpture"

EBONY AND IVORY