The restoration of the ensemble of heritage buildings on Buffelsdrift, west of Ladismith in the arid Klein Karoo region of the Western Cape, by SAOTA and Jaco Booyens Architect, a specialist in clay buildings, recently won the gold medal at the seventh edition of the international Domus Restoration and Conservation Award in Italy.
Q&A with Jaco Booyens and Greg Truen
Q: How was lighting chosen so as not to detract from the building’s heritage?
A: On the outer facades we used two types of lighting. The lights next to doors or entrances when entering the buildings were custom designed and manufactured lights based on Gawie Fagan’s Groot Constantia interpretation of a traditional lantern light. The frames are simple 16 mm mild steel square tube powder coated in black with clear glass covers, built into the mud with two horizontal bars as support. Throughout the scheme these lights were placed just above lintel height. The front facade entrance of the main house has two lantern lights; one on each side of the door.
The lower lights were designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. We decided on mild steel folded plate boxes powder coated in white and built-in flush with the mud walls to create a slot where the light shines downwards. It reads on the facade as a vertical slot emitting light. They can be seen on the front facade as well. These lights also came in handy in the interiors, for instance, to light the Wine Store staircase landing and some of the bathrooms. We mounted one above the freestanding bath and at foot level in the small bathroom’s shower. The lights were also used to light the parking area and as footlights on stone stairs going down from the parking area to the main house kitchen entrance.
Q: Were there issues or challenges with wiring the lighting in ‘old’ walls?
A: Wiring in mud walls is actually a lot easier to install. To hide conduits in a softer material like mud is much less of a fight than grinding into plaster and brick. The whole process can be done without power tools. Lime plaster, being much more ‘plasticy’ and with a more ‘alive’ type surface makes covering it up also quite easy.
Q: The interiors feature an assortment of interesting light fittings – can you tell us more about those?
A: The internal lights were much more contemporary than those outside. The strategy for the internal lighting was to use spotlights for task lighting and to accent artworks. For general mood lighting, we used tabletop lighting, which creates warm zones in the house and fills the space with a general low level of lighting. We used strip lights from Province Lighting fixed to the overhead original Yellow Wood beams and ceilings so as to keep the lights in the background. Task lighting in the bathrooms and some pedestal lights were specifically chosen to be contemporary.
Q: Did the electricity supply to the remote area impact your lighting decisions?
A: The electronics of modern dimmable LED lighting are quite sensitive. We had some issues with the so-called dirty electricity in the countryside. I would propose the next time round to try and get the lighting circuit specifically to be run off grid with solar and an inverter to give the lights clean, high quality electricity. A fairly small system should be able to carry the load for this.
The restoration involved a cluster of Cape buildings in a valley beneath the Swartberg mountain range, consisting of a main house and two barns, plus a store. A short way off is a flat-roofed building, typical of the Ladismith style, which was originally used as a wine store. Other structures on the property include a contemporary shed, a cottage further up a hill and a graveyard. The house, barns and wine store were all restored.
SAOTA director Greg Truen, who acquired the farm in 2016, notes that while minor additions and modern alterations had been made to the buildings, the original house, was “in good condition, considering” and that the barns were “fundamentally untouched”. In the main house, evidence of earlier refurbishments in the 1970s, were stripped out, while modern kitchen and bathrooms were inserted in an adaptive approach to conservation. A new pump house was added near the dam wall on the property. Its design and construction were an experiment in contemporary architecture using the same materials and techniques as the heritage buildings, including poured mud or ‘cob” walls, as well as brick vaulted roofs.
The landscaping around the house took the form of a series of low terraces. Licences to graze livestock on the land date back to the mid-1700s, and it is clear that it was farmed before the 1800s. The main house on this portion on the farm dates back to 1852. Hans Fransen’s seminal study, The Old Buildings of The Cape, records “three old buildings … all with Prince Albert-type end- gables (holbol with horizontal string courses)”. The main T-shaped homestead, he says, “has massive loft steps at the side and original holbol stoepbankies”. The house and barns had been constructed according to the usual technique used by Dutch settlers in the Cape, with walls of poured mud or clay, cast layer by layer about 700 mm wide. “This method of construction – ubiquitously used by Dutch settlers, trekboers and later Voortrekkers – requires a source of clayey ground into which is added ‘a good proportion’ of sand and grit, possibly straw or dung, combined in a pit, all trod through by oxen-hooves in span,” writes Fisher (quoting William John Burchell’s Travels In The Interior Of Southern Africa).
Truen and Booyens opted to use a thin lime plaster on the interior walls between the central living room and the bedrooms on either side, not only expressing the original texture of the mud wall, but also, as Truen puts it, leaving “a little of that construction history visible, so you can get a bit of a story of how these building were put together”. In the living space, the original Yellow Wood beams and ceiling were intact and could be restored. The timber floors, however, had rotted and were replaced with poplar planks, consistent with the originals, kiln dried in Oudtshoorn.
The screed floors of the T-section, which was converted into a combined kitchen and dining area, bathroom and front stoep were all refinished using “stone pavers taken out of the veld”, as were the kitchen courtyard and front stoep. Where modern materials were introduced, they were carefully selected. The shower (in the recess originally used for a fireplace), for example, has been clad in terrazzo slabs, and in the kitchen, a contemporary island has been inserted, also clad in terrazzo.
“We looked for a contemporary material that spoke to the original materials,” says Truen. The concrete and aggregate in Terrazzo resonate with the stone and cement paving. “The terrazzo felt like a way to work between the old and the new, where the new felt like it had some kind of genesis in the old,” says Truen. The kitchen block also makes it possible to keep the kitchen and dining areas integrated, making it a central social space, while a 200 mm raised barrier above the counter ensures that the food preparation area is unobtrusive. Appliances are stored below the counter. “There are no contemporary appliances sitting at higher levels other than this extractor fan,” says Truen.
One of the only contemporary interventions was the addition of a double-sided fireplace between the kitchen and lounge area. Recessed lights were used on the exterior walls to keep the walls unmolested by modern technology. Where lanterns were added, on either side of the front door, for example, and elsewhere on the main house, as well as on the wine store, they were custom made. Their design took cues from lanterns the legendary Cape modernist architect and restoration maestro Gawie Fagan designed for a wine cellar at Groot Constantia, one of Cape Town’s most famous historical wine farms. Fagan played a pivotal role in “figuring out a way to interpret Cape detailing and reference it in his modernist work”, explains Truen.
Other buildings
The Wine Store
The outbuilding that is referred to as the wynkelder in reference to a time when grapes were grown on the farm, is a small flat-roofed structure that has been restored and converted into a living unit. It was badly damaged and had been clumsily altered. An incongruous timber pergola and a brick fireplace had been added to the exterior. The fireplace, however, had delaminated from the wall and was collapsing. The walls were also badly damaged by termites and the floors and ceiling rotted. When repairs began, it was discovered that the wine store had originally been a single-level building, and its parapet was raised in the 1970s to allow for another level so it could be used as a house. “When we repaired the plaster, we could see that the bottom part of the building was made out of poured mud, and then as you go up, there are some sundried bricks, and then more contemporary bricks right at the top,” says Truen. A somewhat clunky staircase has also been added.
The repairs and restoration of the wine store involved reorganising the ground level so that it could function as a living area and kitchen, and locating the bedroom and bathroom on the mezzanine above. The ground floor was levelled and paved in stone harvested from the surrounding veld. The rotted upper floor was replaced with SA pine, which was limewashed. The roof upstairs was finished with poplar beams and a rietdak ceiling. “We had to create a new stair between the levels,” says Truen.
“Of course, that raised the question of how you insert new fabric into old fabric.” Booyens designed a new self-supporting steel staircase as a contrasting contemporary insertion. “The staircase doesn’t touch the original structure of the building,” he says. It floats above the floor and is set slightly apart from the walls, connecting at a single point on the floor and at just one point on the mezzanine level.” The exterior of the wine store has been painted pink partly in reference to the historical practice in the karoo of mixing lime to make a light red or pink colour, and partly in an exploration of some of the historical connections between Cape and Mexican architecture.
Pump House
The pump house is a new building constructed in response to the need for an irrigation building. “It was an opportunity to experiment and test some ideas we had to do with contemporary architecture built using traditional techniques,” says Truen.
The building forms a connection between the landscape and the dam wall. Its earth-coloured walls take their cue from the poured-mud walls of the heritage buildings. “It’s a technique somewhere between rammed earth and working with concrete,” explains Booyens. “You could almost say it’s a primitive form of working with concrete, but instead of concrete, we worked with mud.” The walls are more than a metre thick, and have been left unpainted, expressing their materiality and blending with the landscape. The vaulted brick roof was an experiment in construction devised to simplify the expensive and highly skilled labour usually required to construct vaults. It involved creating a system of steel beams and a plywood template, and building the vault one row at a time, which proved both cost efficient and appropriate for the skills available locally. “When we took the shutter out, it stood up, because it was a real catenary arch,” says Booyens.
The rest of the roof is planted, and steel waterspouts cantilever far out from the walls so that water draining from the roof does not fall against the wall, a technique adapted from vernacular West African adobe architecture. “For me it was a really interesting experience to go and find materials on site, and then build something that is so fundamentally in tune with the climate and performs so much better than any contemporary building,” says Truen. “There are definitely lessons there.”
