A century-old Johannesburg cottage, revamped for a cook, an art director and their young family, mixes a monochrome palette with a subtle combination of contemporary and vintage design

The predominantly black-and-white palette of this century-old cottage in Johannesburg wasn’t a preconceived design decision. Rather, it arose as almost inevitably from two opposite ends of the design spectrum. One was the fact that the artworks that homeowners Guy and Nicola Bower had collected tended to be black-and-white prints. (They both studied graphic design, so perhaps strong graphic elements were inevitable in their home.) Less whimsical, perhaps, was the fact that the house itself ended up with white walls and black window and door frames.

The frames were certainly a conscious decision, but the walls were a choice by default. After carrying out a renovation and alteration, Nicola says, “We tried to paint some of the interior walls a colour.” (Their bedroom remains a muted grey green.) “But it was just too dark, so we decided to paint everything white to start with and see what happened after that. And they just stayed that way.”

Neither of them practices graphic design any more as such. Nicola is an art director at an advertising agency and Guy is what you might call a “food entrepreneur”, running his own business called The Bowery, which does everything from catering to innovative meal kits and office lunch and take-home dinner deliveries.

Nonetheless, says Guy, aesthetics matter to them both: “We both have a creative eye and like beautiful spaces.”

They chose their home, however, more for the gardens and the sunset views than the house itself. Local landscaper Tim Conradie was among the house’s previous residents, and he had created a beautiful terraced garden dropping down to a swimming pool on the sloping site. The view from the back stoep, Guy adds, was spectacular. “The patio has unbelievable sunset views through the plane tree,” he says. “At sunset, you get a golden glow most of the year. Even in winter, I find myself in a jacket sitting outside just to see the sunset.”

The house itself, however, they found less compelling. While historical cottages like this have tons of charm, they weren’t designed with light and views in mind, so they can seem dark and pokey. “But it had nice bits, like the pressed ceilings,” Nicola concedes.

It was exactly 100 years old when they decided to intervene with a renovation.

“I didn’t think we were going to renovate,” says Guy. “I thought we were going to paint it, and maybe add a garage…”

“I always knew,” says Nicola.

Architect Victoria de la Cour provided advice and drew up plans for them, and Guy took on the project management. “We found out that it wasn’t originally a house; it was a social worker’s office,” says Guy. It had been somewhat altered in the 80s.

They preserved the pressed metal ceilings so sought after in the city’s older suburbs, but after one too many sandings, the original Oregon pine sprung floors had to be replaced. They chose cushiony engineered oak floors that Guy says are so luxurious, “you wanna lie on them.”

Some carefully inserted glass stacking doors and windows, including a wide pivot door at the front entrance, brought light into the interiors and opened them out onto the gardens.

One of Guy’s favourite features arose from the somewhat counterintuitive choice that the windows should extend all the way down to floor level rather than being raised to look up into the trees. The raised position of the house, and the descending levels of the terraced gardens meant that low windows actually let in the best views.

“My favorite feature is the pill windows,” says Nicola, referring to the elegant capsule-shaped windows that let light into the passages and create views with an almost art-deco flourish. “It’s such a smart idea that added so much.”

A long window that stacks away between the kitchen counter and the patio is an absolute gift to the cook and entertainer in Guy, who loves to fill the big patio table with family and friends on weekends, sometimes with more than one “sitting” a day!

“I just put all the platters out on their kitchen counter, and people can serve themselves,” he says. Apart from having a vantage point from which he can enjoy the sunset while he cooks dinner, he’s never excluded from the action when guests are on the patio.  

So, with sleek black window frames and crisp white walls as an architectural base, and black-and-white artworks for the walls, it followed almost inevitably that the interiors and furniture would follow suit. “And my favorite colour is black,” adds Nicola. “It also seems quite practical with dogs and kids.”

The eclecticism of their furnishings, particularly the easy combination of old and new, harmonized perfectly with the mixture of contemporary and century-old architectural features.

“Nicola and I sourced old vintage light fittings from all over Joburg,” says Guy. Vintage-store finds ranging from the coincidentally pill-shaped dining table to the crockery cabinet rub shoulders with sleek contemporary South African design pieces: sofas from the modernist-inflected Mezzanine Interiors, who also designed the marble-topped circular coffee table and the server in the main sitting room, and Tonic Design. An Ercol Studio Couch from a vintage shop in Cape Town, spotted while on holiday, with its modernist take on a classic English Windsor-chair, chimes with the narrative of classic meets modern design, especially when in the company of Houtlander’s spindle-backed Diner Bench. 

The kitchen, of course, was crucial to Guy, and while he says he might have tended towards the industrial look of a test kitchen, he concedes that it “had to look pretty”. Nicola points out that because the kitchen is open to the living and dining areas, it was made to recede, to be “nothing” as she puts it. The handle-less black cabinets and drawers all but disappear in the little 4x3m nook, the fridge concealed behind them, while the marble countertops were a hard-won dream come true. “We just used birch ply plywood for a while until we could replace that with some Carrara marble,” says Nicola.

It’s small, but that encouraged a very careful consideration on Guy’s part of what he needed and what’s actually superfluous, so it is designed to have everything he needs, and absolutely nothing more. Everything that matters has a place, and if it doesn’t have a place, it doesn’t stay!

It’s an approach that seems to have percolated through to the rest of the house, where the decisions are clear and the restraint admirable. Together with the coherence of the palette, the harmonious combination of original and contemporary architecture with vintage and of-the-moment design achieves that holy grail of lifestyle and design: tranquility. The perfect canvas for life.

WORDS Graham Wood IMAGES Elsa Young

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