Fresh Start

Interior designer Lynne Harris-Whitfield has melded old and new in her relaxed family home in Cape Town, which combines considered space planning with a trove of creative touches

- LIZ MORRIS

Tucked away at the end of a discreet little panhandle in Cape Town’s Oranjezicht – a neighbourhood well known for its attractive Victorian era villas – interior designer Lynne Harris-Whitfield’s home is set back from the road, behind a squad of square-pruned trees. And the house soon reveals itself as something special, combining as it does a familiar sense of engaging Victorian poise with a different sense of scale: the building features a very untypical flat roof in its second-floor addition.

Lynne and her husband Gavin bought the house before they had a family, and at that stage it was a single-storey, three-bedroom cottage with good bones, good scale and an unusual double gable. A week before they moved in, disaster struck in the form of a fire that gutted the interior, but they decided to turn adversity into advantage. So, they rebuilt, replacing many of the original period finishes (including floors, doors and fireplaces) with more contemporary versions.

Several years later – at which point Lynne and Gavin had two young daughters and a son on the way – the family needed more space, but didn’t want to move because they loved the location. And so they embarked on a further extensive alteration and addition, which resulted in the creation of two additional bedrooms for the girls in a new first floor, and generated both better flow and a more modern, user-friendly ground level that also enabled better use of the outdoor spaces.