Home At Last
Home South Africa|June 2017

After seven long years spent searching for just the right spot in the countryside, the Koegelenbergs have created their own platteland paradise.

Marian Van Wyk
Home At Last

Martie Koegelenberg sings the praises of her family’s charming home in the Overberg, but the house today is a far cry from the smallholding they saw for the first time in 2007. The property had been sorely neglected and the asking price was way more than they could afford – they didn’t even venture through the gate.

Back then, the Koegelenbergs lived in Hout Bay. “We'd promised our daughter Annieke that she could get a horse when she was 12 years old and we were running out of time,” says Martie, a DA councillor in Caledon. “We searched for the right place in the countryside for seven years – every weekend, we would go village hopping!”

Gert, an electrical contractor, recalls: “I took a map and used a compass to draw circles with a radius of 50km and 200km from Cape Town in an attempt to find the ideal town.”

Caledon, however, wasn’t on the list – although it's only 112km from Cape Town. But then an agent called them a year later to tell them about a 1.1ha smallholding that had been on the market for three years – the same property where they’d made a hasty U-turn at the gate! “It was badly neglected and the stoep was dilapidated. There were no outbuildings to speak of except for a semi-repaired barn and we had to walk through the empty house four times before we could make sense of all the rooms.”

Nevertheless, the place stole Martie’s heart – and very quickly too. “I remember sitting down in the middle of the living room floor, trying to regain my composure. The asking price was a lot more than we could afford. We’d also just finished renovating our house in Hout Bay. The whole way back home, Gert and I said not one word to each other!”

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