It’s seldom one hears talk of a home that’s been ‘stitched’ into a landscape. It’s not the sort of sartorial language architects tend to use. So, it’s a word one latches onto when listening to Michelle Rhoda, a director at ARRCC interior architecture and design studio, talk through a contemporary country villa in the Paarl-Franschhoek Valley, for which she was project lead. That the home’s been ‘stitched’ intimately connects it to its surrounds, effectively blurring the boundaries between indoors and out, and is one of many unusual characteristics of the project. Others include the overriding limitations of the architectural and design brief, and the fact that the heart of the home – its living area off which all wings flow – has the openness of a pavilion. It’s these that the judges took note of when awarding the villa residential winner of the World Architecture News Awards EMEA 2024. Among other praiseworthy comments, the judging panel said, ‘It’s a stunning home expressive of its location and executed with skill and rigorous consideration of detailing. The way that the landscape penetrates the house and the dramatic views out of the house are well-considered.’
‘The layout of the home comprises five overlapping squares – it’s a cruciform arrangement,’ Rhoda explains. ‘This creates a series of green pockets and courtyards around the house, as if it were stitched into the landscape.’ There’s that word, but what does it mean? Simply put, this is no uniformly rectangular or square home. Nor is it L-, U-, or even the more complex H-shaped. Rather, four squares interlock with the corners of a central rectangle, the entertainment space. Three of these house sleeping quarters, pyjama lounges, TV rooms and studies, while the fourth features the kitchen, scullery and utility rooms. The advantage of this configuration is that it allows for more external ‘surface area’, up against which the landscape can run. It’s much like a serrated potato crisp, with its grooves creating more capture space for flavouring.
Here, the flavour comes from the home’s relationship to its environment, the Simonsberg, Drakenstein and Paarl Rock mountains, all of which – through a considered use of pocketing glass sliding doors – are welcomed into the home. The villa’s floorplan not only maximises views in all directions, but creates sheltered outdoor living spaces on either side of the central entertainment area, so that whatever the weather, there’s always at least one wind-free outdoor zone. These include two lounges, a braai station, and a pool complete with a floating island. The pool is sheltered by a white powder-coated aluminium canopy that folds to meet it. As the judges noted, this showstopper architectural structure ‘frames the views and at the same time creates a sense of enclosure for the outdoor space’.
‘This is design that’s completely surrendered to its natural surroundings,’ Rhoda says of both the interior and exterior living spaces. ‘The absence of structural columns makes for a seamless indoor-outdoor connection, and enhances the sense of a light, floating structure.’ The architectural lightness Rhoda describes is equally a result of the home’s pitched roofs, one of a number of aesthetic guidelines specified by the residential estate. These include exposed timber rafters (in keeping with a Cape vernacular), and a material palette that calls for natural stonework, off-shutter concrete and timber cladding.
‘The way that the landscape penetrates the house and the dramatic views out of the house are well-considered.’
ARRCC’s inclusion of the latter defines the arrival experience, with the villa’s striking entrance characterised by a double-volume use of timber slats. Enter the lobby, and these repeat moments later, enclosing the wine cellar. The immediate sense of warmth this timber lends to these voluminous spaces extends into the lounge, with its unusually asymmetrical pitched ceiling clad in alpaca white oak, and in which lighting has been concealed. Below it, surrounded by Paco rugs, and furniture from Okha, Casarredo and Leon @ CCXIX, is another of the villa’s bespoke features: a near five-metre-long sandstone plinth, hand-chiselled by John De Jager Studio, atop which a glass fireplace is positioned.
Rhoda describing the villa as stitched into its surrounds attributes to ARRCC’s project a sartorial relevance, a connotation that isn’t amiss. For here is a refined home, with elongated lines, sophisticated forms and, like the most desirable of tailored garments, an elegant material palette. As she defines it, this is a home that ‘demonstrates new ways of living that are at once delightfully surprising and unmistakably innate’.
Martin Jacobs
