Make Mine A Double

Featuring a Mix of Raw Materials, Lush Foliage and Clever Design, This Adventurous Home in Cape Town Packs a Powerful Yet Family-friendly Punch

- Kerryn Fischer

 

The energy of ad man, chef, author, retailer and hotelier Neil Roake knows no bounds. In the creative arena, there is very little that he doesn’t tackle and in which he doesn’t wildly succeed. Take, for instance, The Space, a retail store that was the first to support local designers 20 years ago, which is still going strong today. Or The Concierge Boutique Bungalows, his award-winning design driven hotel in Durban. Consider Neil’s Life’s A Beach Cottage cookbooks as well as the demands of his advertising and marketing agency Modern Museum, plus a new retail offering called Now Showing about to launch in Cape Town, and you’ll begin to understand the magnitude of force that propels this man forward.

And yet, when it came to building his new home in Cape Town’s sought-after suburb of Bakoven, Neil admits to feeling a little overwhelmed. ‘There were times when I stood looking up at what was then a mess of a building site and thought it impossible that we would ever get it right,’ he says. By all accounts it was a complicated brief, because the steep, slightly awkward plot had to accommodate two separate houses – both of which had to look out onto the mountains at the rear and the seascape in front.