Earth + Sky

A New House on Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard Challenges the Conventional Approach Typical of Most of Its Neighbours, at Once Aiming to Be More Deferential to the Natural Beauty of Its Setting, and Friendlier to People on the Street

- Graham Wood

Walk along Kloof Road in Clifton, Cape Town, and you’ll notice that there’s one house where the joggers, dog walkers and strollers tend to slow, stop and gather for a chat. ‘Clifton doesn’t have the typical suburban setup where people just drive. There’s a lot of foot traffic and people use the sidewalks,’ says architect Jan-Heyn Vorster of this seaside neighbourhood. Vorster and his life partner Pieter Bruwer built the abode specifically with the hope that it would be friendlier to the street than the blank, overpowering mansions typical of the Atlantic Seaboard.

The properties in the area tend to follow a fairly predictable formula: get up as high as you can and face the seascape, and build as big as you can according to real-estate logic. ‘They are built from left to right, the full width of the site, to maximise the views,’ says Vorster. They typically have no garden, and rather a deck and a swimming pool outside. For all the beauty of those ocean vistas, however, Vorster points out that the buildings all face west, so they tend to be uncomfortably exposed to the harsh afternoon sun.

Vorster and Bruwer had been living in an old 1940s Clifton house for two years before they decided to rebuild. While their old home ‘didn’t respond very well to the site’ (and left them with a long, steep climb up the stairs carrying groceries from the garage), they nonetheless learnt some important lessons while living there. ‘It told us a few things about wind, wind direction, the views, the sun and how to design around these climatic challenges,’ says Vorster.