‘We’re living ourdream’

A foodie and a winemaker have found their happy place in a characterful home in the Overberg.

- Marie Opperman

When Renée and Jean Daneel started looking for a house in 2005, they came across an old barn with a chicken coop, tractor shed and cowshed in a backyard in Napier and immediately fell in love with it.

These days, when you dine at the chic restaurant that Renée has been operating in the original house on the property since 2005, you’d never guess that it was the once unsightly old barn behind the house that was the biggest drawcard for this couple.

The building in the backyard consisted of three rooms next to each other covered by a rusty corrugated-iron roof. “Right next door, as befits a dwelling from yesteryear such as this, was a pit toilet,” Renée recalls. Nonetheless, it was love at first sight. “We were smitten.”

Jean has been a winemaker for about 40 years. He met Renée when she was the public relations officer for KWV and was presenting wine-tastings and food demos. “Back then, we were passionate about wine and food, and nothing’s changed,” she says with a smile.

After years of living in manor houses on wine farms, the couple moved to Napier in the picturesque Overberg. “When Jean was a winemaker at Buitenverwachting in Constantia in the eighties, we lived in the 200-year-old manor house,” says Renée.

“After that he worked for Morgenhof in Stellenbosch. In 1997, he started making wine under his own label, Jean Daneel Wines, in a friend’s renovated stables in Franschhoek. I ran a restaurant there in a rented barn. But my dream was to one day own my own restaurant in my own building.” 

Barn becomes a home