This late 1950’s home, previously known as Huis Paauw, is situated in one of Stellenbosch’s established suburbs and forms part of the residential collection of works designed by the late German architect Pius Pahl.
Knowing the history of the house the project teams design approach was to retain and refurbish the original house and look carefully at how the new brief could be sensitively added.
The first part of this design exercise was the removal of 1980’s additions to the rear and side of the house, bring it back to its original 1958 footprint. The original house plans showed an alternate roof design for the garage space, which had never been built, and this idea was incorporated into the new design.
The remainder of the original house required a few internal alterations in order to provide more generous bedrooms that included en-suite bathrooms, and the opening up of the kitchen space to form part of the dining and living areas. With the rear extension removed it allowed the inclusion of a new glass opening towards the northern façade leading out onto a covered terrace with the all important braai to its right and swimming pool to the left. The rest of the house received a well-deserved refurbishment.
The new additional is a double-storey volume, kept low in scale in order to be sensitive to the original single-storey house. It runs along the eastern edge of the property and is positioned where the old stoep was. This connection point becomes the new visitors’ entrance and, with landscaped walkway leading one from the street into the house, forms a new entrance axis at the meeting of old and new.
The addition creates a private courtyard for all the surrounding living and bedroom spaces to open up onto and allows visual connections between the spaces. The new landscaping, which has retained many of the existing established trees as possible, provides the finishing touch.
