HEART OF STONE
Living space|August 2023
An opulent Edwardian home on Johannesburg's Westcliff Ridge provides the perfect setting for the romantic, eclectic style of its vintage fashion connoisseur owner.
GRAHAM WOOD
HEART OF STONE

Stonecrest - one of the most beautifully unaltered Edwardian homes on the Westcliff Ridge in Johannesburg - is named after the carved stone crest high on its red brick façade. Set above two tall, gracefully arched windows, the crest features a sleek, noble-looking hound at its centre.

"One early owner, I was told, had 17 dogs," says Annabelle Desfontaines, who has lived there for the past 30-odd years and can still remember walking up the driveway for the first time as a young woman. She has a couple of hounds who look very similar to the one on the crest, which adds a strange sense of timelessness to the way she and her family inhabit Stonecrest - it seems they could always have been here. Her beautifully eclectic style only adds to the effect.

The house was built in 1902 and, although it had a few alterations along the way - by none other than the master of colonial architecture, Herbert Baker, in 1911 and later, in 1935, by Cowin & Ellis - retains the spirit of its age.

It's a classical colonial Arts and Crafts mansion - part country pile, part suburban grande dame, part castle on a hill. From a plinth of local stone (the architects at the time celebrated earthy, honest local materials and handcrafted details), the house rises with a broad layer of red brick and a strip of stippled Tyrolean topped with a slate roof. The terraced gardens fall away so that the bedrooms seem as if they're among the treetops and the views carry the eye over Joburg's urban forest. (The Randlords - Johannesburg's instantly rich turn-of-the-century mining magnets, moguls and captains of industry and commerce, for whom these grand houses were built, liked to feel they were masters of all they surveyed.)

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Denne historien er fra August 2023-utgaven av Living space.

Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.

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