When visiting this house, one is struck by a beautiful ambiguity: it is both a Victorian row house and a machine for living in. This dual representation is engendered by the design of the facade as a habitable space, a traditional stoep rendered as a transparent black steel frame accommodating sliding gates, rolling cycles, opening doors, growing plants…

The house is in fact a reworking of a 70m² single storey Victorian cottage with an unusable basement beneath. This has been reconfigured into 170m² of interior space with habitable balcony space to front and rear on all levels and with a roof terrace tucked behind the profile of the pitched roof.

Even before one enters the front door, the sky is visible through the storey-height fanlight. Crossing the threshold, an open tread between walls leads up to the open-plan living area with the kitchen area opening out through to the stoep onto the street, the lounge towards the back reveals what is hidden from the street - a panorama of the city in its bowl, the mountains of Stellenbosch beyond.

In the centre of the house space sits the dining table, with a ceramic stove off to one side and a glowing glass prism to the other. A light scoop against the wall reveals itself to be a bench on the roof terrace above. This room in the sky is reached via a delicate steel stair pinned lightly to the party wall and hanging from its handrail. It is a space in which to experience what Le Corbusier understood to be life’s essential pleasures - sol, espace et verdure; sun space and greenery.

Light falls from the roof here through the glowing glass box on the living level, punches through the ground floor bringing light and air to the bathrooms located at the centre of this and the lowest level. Leaving the house, one climbs up a solid, earthbound stair which brings light from the back of the house all the way to the front. Looking back from the street, one can glimpse through the punched metal screens of the kitchen window back up to the roof terrace, perhaps someone silhouetted against the sky.

Everything in the house is what it is, and does what it needs to do, there is no styling, no over-articulation, no disguise. It is the necessary and sufficient statement of its place, its construction, its utility and of the pleasures and values shared by its owners and its architect.

As such it is not just a particular house, but also a model of what a house should be.

Text by Kevin Fellingham.