NATURAL CONNECTIONS

And so began a lengthy process of planning and building, conceived by Laureen in partnership with her daughter Renée Rossouw. Renée is an architect by training and an acclaimed designer who was part of a group of young African creatives who had worked on furniture giant IKEA’s Överallt collection in 2019.

Inside the house, it’s impossible not to be captivated by the visual feast created by the classic 20th-century furniture, authentic design objects, and unique artworks that fill the interiors. But what really makes Laureen’s painstakingly curated collection shine is the way it fits into the context of the reworked spaces.

“The exterior had all the good elements of a mid-century-meets-art deco house, but the interior spaces were almost completely redone as these didn’t have [spatial] flow or enough light,” says Renée. The motherand-daughter duo turned the garden-facing kitchen into a breathtaking double-volume space. They added more glazing and openings elsewhere, including a large circular porthole in the dining area, as well as clerestory windows and interior glass and metal doors. The aim was to reconnect the house with its beautiful garden, which is now a lush masterpiece, and the greenery of the park landscape beyond it.

Besides having as an abundance of natural light in its interiors, the house is now an intriguing and visually-pleasing exercise in geometry. It has become an embodiment of the fact that its sense of symmetry is not really about straight lines, but rather an expression of the most pleasing combinations of shapes based on rectangles and circles.