To successfully translate the story of a home with one foot in the past and one in the present is a delicate business. If you succeed, it is like authoring a book whose beginning was written in a distinctly different era and crafting an ending for today that is not only coherent but also captivating. With roughly a hundred years from the beginning of its story to now, this graceful Westcliff home is a best-seller.
Designed and later altered by architectural greats Francis Fleming and Philip Watermeyer respectively and set in one of Joburg’s most sought-after hilltop suburbs, giants of trees and an immense garden equate to rare peace. It was these traits, coupled with its generous scale and hard-to-replicate architectural details, that sold the owners, who ‘viewed’ and bought the property from some 9 000 kilometers away.
Living and working between South Africa and the UK, they wanted a home that would offer a sense of belonging, a base to welcome both husband and wife, and their three children, who often visit from England. Despite it being dark and stuffy, plied with thick carpeting and awash in a palette of pea green and yolky yellow, the house telegraphed the potential for a new story to be written.
Tasked with editing the old and incorporating the new, Interior Designer Tessa Proudfoot worked long distances with the homeowners to bring her signature sense of elegant ease to the scene. To do it justice, the space needed to be stripped back, invigorated, and given context. The latter was two-fold: calling for a relationship with the time in which it finds itself, but also the place. ‘Interiors do not translate very well between countries,’ as the homeowner discovered. With her style rooted in a traditionally English aesthetic, all furniture, art, and objects needed to be calibrated to South Africa and its visual cues. That meant switching her green velvet cushions and floral print sofas for a more dialled-down mood board of natural finishes and luxuriously laid-back textiles in earthy shades from tobacco to mustard. Tessa uses textiles as a core means to set a mood in her projects; having collaborated with St Leger & Viney on two of her collections, she has a passion for quality fabrics, layering them adeptly and also using them to bring an element of contrast. It was also her flair for orchestrating ‘just the right arrangement of things to bring an interior and its story together, that appealed to the homeowners. This knack for matchmaking and juxtapositions is evident throughout the home, where you might spot a mid-century style lamp or honed granite side table keeping company with a rattan daybed or an antique chest of drawers.
In the living room, a pair of all-white sofas frames a commanding 18th-century Dutch armoire, and a custom wallpaper depicting a mythical forest scene wraps all four walls. Throughout, the owners’ ample collection of French and Swedish antiques has been coupled with Anglo-Indian colonial pieces, ‘lightening the interior and lending it a South African undercurrent without it being overtly African,’ Tessa explains. Looking around the five-bedroom heritage house today, you would never know there was any threat of a style stand-off. If anything, it is a lesson in how to marry designs and elements of contrasting origins, even contrasting eras. Here is a home that is as grand as it is livable, both curated and comfortable, European and African, where antiques, fine art, and luxury fabrics come together with an air of nonchalance and are afforded room to breathe among now crisp white walls.
Words by Mila Crewe-Brown | Photographs and Styling by Karl Rogers | Vignette
