City House
Cape Town
Restoration and renovations
350 sqm
2020 - 2021
Extensive renovations and restoration work to a Victorian detatched home in the City of Cape Town. The previous owner (who was an architect) built extensive renovations which almost erased the building’s Victorian origins. Djernes & Bell restored the front of the house to is original Victorian detail and strengthed the connection between the contemporary extension, historic house and garden.
A soft-touch renovation of an already altered semi-detatched Victorian home in Cape Town. The home had already been rather drastically altered by its previous occupant: architect and Gordon-Matta Clarke/ Moleman fan, who sadly no longer with us and whose brain we would have enjoyed picking during the design and renovation project if we could have.
The design restores the front half of the Victorian house whilst allows his previous extension to open up and reveal its un-originalness. We have created new openings where he had casually cut through gypsum walls and maintained the double height rooms he created, only resurfacing and tidying edges. His left vast collection of hard-wood timber was used to create new thresholds, handrails and other details.
Demolition and new-builld was limited to bare minimum, instead there was focus on resurfacing and revealing existing building parts in order to extend their lifetime and create a family-focussed home, whilst allowing the Victorian and the previous-owners histories to reveal themself.
