Playing By The Rules

Faced with creative constraints, designer John Jacob triumphs with this stylish sanctuary geared towards easy family living

- Piet Smedy

Going into this project I couldn’t have been less excited. The client had bought a cottage at a Steenberg development and I couldn’t help thinking: this is going to be a particular challenge. We couldn’t change any of the architectural elements of the building, so our creativity was limited to only reworking the internal finishings and the joinery. In the end it was the very fact that it was so constrained that made it exciting – in the end it feels fabulous. With just a few well-executed tweaks I was able to make a very big difference to the overall look and feel of the place and change the whole message.

The most notable of these tweaks was to the window heights, or unfortunate lack thereof. Although I couldn’t change them architecturally, by taking the curtains up to the ceiling and adding a dummy blind to hide the in-between wall space, you get a much grander impression. A curtain isn’t a curtain, it’s a proportion – and it’s this, not the fabric, that completely changes the way people understand a space.