Cottage Industry

Fashion designer Marianne Fassler’s avant-garde ’70s cabin in the Tsitsikamma forest has been reinvented with her unique, craft-inspired style and eye for pattern and colour

- Graham Wood

#ESCAPE

Season after season, for more than four decades, Marianne Fassler has managed to reinvigorate the vibrant contemporary Africanism that has been her trademark to advance the possibilities of local aesthetics, craft and pattern. As social, political and aesthetic climates have shifted and changed, she’s constantly operated at the cutting edge, seemingly defying the laws of nature. One of the secrets to her tireless ability to remain inventive and relevant, however, has been the fact that she has never limited herself to the realm of fashion design. Her wide-ranging interest in all aspects of art, culture, craft and design give her aesthetics a depth and range that few in her field can draw on. And the way that she and her husband Charles Bothner recently refurbished and made a small alteration to the wooden cabin that is their Garden Route hideaway in Nature’s Valley, perfectly illustrates how holistic and comprehensive her approach to design is.

Marianne and her family has returned to this private refuge, which has belonged to the family since her father commissioned it to be built in the early ’70s, since she was in her early twenties. ‘It is right in the middle of the Tsitsikamma National Park, so there’s no commercial development there, and it can never get any bigger,’ says Marianne. ‘There is just a narrow strip, literally four roads, with a big lagoon. It’s so peaceful. Our view from the living room is a wall of ancient forest.’ The sense of escape is total. Once there, Marianne and Charles hardly leave the valley. ‘At the top of the pass there’s a nice community of people doing organic farming,’ says Marianne. ‘There’s a farm stall there that has everything you want, so we don’t ever have to go [grocery shopping].’

THE HOUSE