Casper van der Merwe and Hein Visser had been living in the popular tourist town of Tofo, in the Inhambane Province of southeastern Mozambique for eight years where they ran a guest house and restaurant.

But the pair grew tired of the always-a-party lifestyle of Tofo and wanted a little respite, a quiet oasis from the hustle and bustle. So they scourged the surroundings for a property and found it perched on a dune just outside Tofo, fringed by a lush mangrove forest, which puts just enough space between them and the cosmopolitan town and popular beach. 

“It is a massive dream that became reality,” says Casper. “We spent a long time dreaming and envisioning what we wanted the house to look like but also how the spaces needed to live. We made it very vivid for ourselves.”

They imagined an elegant, clean-lined house where everything could open up. “With a superb climate such as this, you want to make the most of the outdoors, explains Hein. “We imagined features such as being able to fall out of bed and into the pool or taking a bath outside.” Casper concurs: “Unlike the crammed, air-conditioned, low-ceiling concrete houses that we had been renting, we wanted to create this open space that gives you the feeling of being outdoors even when you are indoors.”

Casper counts some of the proponents of Modernism such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Carlo Scarpa as inspiration. “The architecture in Inhambane is incredibly beautiful,” he explains. “It is all old concrete Art Deco and Modernist buildings – I love the simple lines of the buildings.”

The plan of the house is straightforward: A long rectangle of brick and wooden columns, which frees up the walls to become large wooden sliding doors that give a whole new meaning to open-plan. It allows for an internal flexibility and spatial freedom – an important aspect of the design for the couple. Timber sliding doors, which remind of the Japanese shōji screens that act as doors, windows and room dividers all-in-one, allowing whole facades of the house to be opened up.

This is also a natural way to control the building climate: “The doors are almost never closed. Depending on the prevailing wind or of it rains you just close the exposed side,” says Hein. “We don’t have air-conditioning, not even ceiling fans.”

A 600mm clerestory window that runs below the roofline creates the impression that the roof is floating above columns and walls as well as allowing natural lighting into the space when the doors are closed.  While the planning phase was effortless, building proved to be more challenging.

Because of the sandy soil site preparation was crucial. The whole footprint of the house was excavated to foundation depth and the soil was replace with a compacted sand-cement mixture. The footings for the timber columns where then excavated from the stabilized soil.

Manufactured construction resources are limited in the country and almost all of the building material, including fittings, were imported. “We literally had to truck in everything – taps, basins, lighting, and ironmongery – except copper piping,” explains Hein. “Which adds another layer of logistics and costs to the building project.”

The couple also sank a borehole and laid irrigation – a necessity in the warm clime and sandy soil – to cultivate a lawn around the houses and planted more than 140 trees including Cashew (Anacardium occidentale), Flamboyant (Delonix regia) Indian almond (Terminalia catappa) and Pride of India (Lagerstroemia indica). “We plotted the houses in such a way as to not sacrifice any of the exiting trees,” Casper says. “We wanted the mature trees to form part of the design.” 

Although not a typical Modernist glass box, the transparency achieved by the openness of the house accomplishes to some extent the ideologies of Casper’s icon Mies van der Rohe when he says: “We should try to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity,” making for an original house that melds with its surroundings and making occupants keenly aware of their environment.

Casper and Hein’s Mozambique house is available for holiday rentals. For more information email Casper at cdesign@live.co.za

WORDS Alma Viviers/ bureaux.co.za Production Sven Alberding/bureaux.co.za Photographs Greg Cox/ bureaux.co.za

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