On a farm in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, this mysterious little barn-like building – essentially a kitchen with an accompanying organic vegetable garden – was handcrafted over four years, reusing salvaged materials.
The main living area is devoted entirely to the kitchen, which is the centrepiece anchoring the house. While the glass front façade has beautiful views of the hills and grasslands of the Cradle of Humankind, the kitchen itself is oriented towards the vegetable garden. Whoever is cooking is thus made aware of where the ingredients come from, while anyone else in the kitchen is positioned to watch and be aware of the transformation of ingredients taking place in the kitchen.
To the back of the house, the kitchen opens onto a long stone retaining wall, built by previous inhabitants who farmed and terraced the landscape to create pastures. The kitchen counter is made from offcuts of oak and eucalyptus left over from the cladding and floorboards. Its faceted shapes pick up on motifs, starting with the angular concrete frame underpinning the façade of the house and sustained in details such as the canopies above the bathroom, front door and lounge. The tiles behind the kitchen counter and splashback are marbled to reflect the colours found in the wood and granite, whereas on the opposite walls, areas of the brickwork have been exposed and framed to exhibit and celebrate the original house textures. The rattan Malawi Chairs are handcrafted in Malawi. The POÄNG rocking-chair is a design classic from Ikea.
The Farm Kitchen is built on the footprint of the original buildings. The challenge was to keep the same programme: where there was a house there is still a house.
If the kitchen was conceived as a barn, the adjacent lounge is based on another agricultural archetype: the lean-to. Lee says it provides a peaceful space at a remove from the kitchen, but which “immerses you in the garden”. Frameless glass makes you “feel you’re in the garden”. The view through the doorway is very much the perspective from the kitchen counter, designed to create a similar sense of connection with the garden while you prepare and cook, and to foster a sense of connection with the earth and awareness of the ways in which the earth sustains us. The table is made from a large section of oak salvaged from the farm.
Every scrap of usable material they could find in the sheds and lying around the farm was repurposed.
When you live on a farm in this part of Africa, you become conscious of the variety of colours in the landscape.
The long, narrow bedroom is a converted garage. While the ceiling here is clad in oak and floorboards made from eucalyptus, just as the kitchen is, the brick walls have been left largely exposed. The massive metal pivot doors, welded using b-grade steel, have an agricultural, engineered quality about them. The horizontal design elements, such as the low window and headboard, emphasise the linear quality of the landscape here, riffing on the lines of the retaining wall behind the bedroom, and the pastures beyond.
The bathroom to the front of the house has a pink curtain wall, which imparts a warm light to the interiors. Off-cut blades of stone (by-products from cutting granite slabs) are built into the wall to create shelves for geological discoveries, minerals, seedpods, and other artefacts.
Words — Graham Wood
Photographs — Elsa Young
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