SUB-URBAN SPLENDOUR

The addition of a contemporary silo-style twin to an old farmhouse in Pretoria transformed a tin-roofed bungalow into a spacious suburban home with an understated urban edge.

- GRAHAM WOOD

When Charlene and Ruan Oberholzer began renovating and expanding their tin-roofed bungalow in the suburb of Menlo Park, Pretoria, they wanted to find a balance between modernising it and preserving its heritage.

Although now firmly ensconced in suburbia, when Charlene and Ruan first consulted architect Nadine Engelbrecht, they found out that when it was originally built in 1949, the house would have been surrounded by open fields rather than streets and houses. Nadine's colleague even tracked down and met its original owners - an elderly couple who showed her 50-yearold photographs of the house overlooking open farmland on the edge of town.

When they bought it, Charlene and Ruan had been charmed by the garden as well as its big trees. Nadine points out, however, that the house had tiny windows and no significant relationship with its setting. "It lived inward, like all the old houses of the time," she says.

To make the most of the garden, they realised that they'd need to make some changes. Nevertheless, Nadine, Charlene and Ruan felt they should preserve this little piece of neighbourhood history as they renovated and added to it. The solution, Nadine says, was to keep the exterior of the house largely unchanged while bashing out most of the internal walls. "We wanted to respect its history while making it an open, airy, voluminous space," she says. The couple decided to open up and integrate the clutter of little bedrooms, living rooms and passages to make a large, open-plan lounge, dining room and kitchen. Nadine also pulled out the ceilings to expose the trusses and create a loftier space. Some of the beams, they discovered, were rotten.