Once dark and a touch gloomy in parts, interior designer, Megan Hesse explains that they didn’t change this traditional home with traditional proportions but gave it light and brought it up to date. “The house is now light, open and breezy, courtesy of some clever adjustments to the interior structure. So, while the bones remained intact, the team knocked out walls and flipped rooms, restored wooden floors and repainted walls to imbue them with life and light and tether them to the outside leafiness.”
To complement the home’s volume, many of the selected pieces are outsize – the copper pendants in the living room are up to a metre in diameter, heavy vintage doors were reused as coffee tables, and there is generously spacious armchair seating that invites you to curl up on a biting winter’s day. Every room carries a strong sense of materiality. Megan opted for raw earthy textures and a landscape-driven palette
The interior designer insists the well-worn cliche is also a very apt one when it comes to Sego and Mark Elliott’s expansive base on a private estate, which comprises a lofty five-bedroom house, a working farm complete with vegetable garden, chickens, goats, horses – even a couple of alpacas – paddocks and stables and a guest cottage, all surrounded by Noordhoek’s characteristic greenery. While this home has no shortage of spaces imbued with warmth, it is in the kitchen where the couple and their three teenage children come together to work, cook, eat and bond.
Here are 7 statement items inspired by the cover.
The House & Garden South Africa July 2022 issue is available on shelves now. Click here to subscribe or get your digital copy.
