A BETTER WAY TO BUILD
A Cape Town architect’s solid-wood Muizenberg hillside garden cottage leads the way in faster and more environmentally friendly construction
Twin loves of design and the wilderness led Cape Town architect Alexander McGee to try to find new ways of building. Those two preoccupations have found expression in a modern timber bungalow at the bottom of his garden on a rocky hillside above Muizenberg, one of Cape Town’s best-known surfing spots. It’s not just a cabin, though — it’s the prototype of an “approach to settling”, as he puts it, that he’s developing so he can offer it to others too. “I’ve always loved being an architect, but felt frustrated by the lack of progress made within our profession,” he says. For many years, while he practised as a “conventional” architect, he saw new opportunities in the construction sector and technological advancements.
“But the building sector seemed to be lagging behind in comparison with other industries,” he says. McGee found himself wondering if there weren’t ways to build more quickly and efficiently. He also wished there were ways to build houses that would leave the landscape clean and undisturbed afterwards.
“I’m passionate about wilderness spaces, and their preservation is becoming central to my intentions,” he says. He adds that, with our work-life relationships having shifted dramatically over the past few years, there’s more interest than ever in building homes in remote locations.
He hoped to find a way to build houses that would not only be sustainable, but might also “enhance the experience of place” for their inhabitants. “I’ve always wanted to hit a higher value chain,” he says. “I wanted to create something I thought would have a bigger, more lasting impact — from an environmental and an architectural perspective.”
Perhaps concentrating on smaller projects might provide him with a platform to express his ideas, he thought. But then he realised that, rather than thinking of homes as “isolated structures”, designing a “building system” might be a more effective approach. It would lead to greater flexibility, and it might even have the potential to “change the professional landscape a bit” because it could be produced at scale.
In his research over the years, McGee had become interested in the potential of cross-laminated timber (CLT) as an alternative to bricks and mortar. CLT is strong, sustainably sourced, clean and precise. It lends itself to off-site manufacture, which means he could design a house with components that would be made in a factory and then assembled quickly at its destination with much less mess and fuss, and much more control, than conventional building.
He discovered that an old architecture school contemporary had a furniture factory and had begun manufacturing CLT made from South African pine in Cape Town, which meant he wouldn’t have to import it. Subsequently, an inquiry from a client who wanted to explore building in a remote location led to, rather than a one-off house, McGee developing his concept in earnest and formalising it as a business model now called Anima Homes.
When he was ready to build a prototype, he believed his own home would be the best place to do it. McGee, his wife Nicole and their two children live in a beautiful old stone house. “The house will be 100 years old this year,” says McGee. The terraced garden, lovingly landscaped by the original owner nearly a century ago, offered the perfect platform.
Though building a traditional garden cottage would never have been a practical possibility, the lightness and “dexterity of the CLT made it a perfect choice for material”, says McGee. There was a spot with an existing garden gate that could serve as a separate entrance, so they decided to go ahead and build a “new, solid-wood home” as an experiment — a personal test case. The wooden home they built, McGee figured, might have several potential uses. While he initially had designs on it as a studio for himself and the headquarters for Anima, its first use has been as guest accommodation and, when it’s not being used, it’s available to tourists and holidaymakers to rent.
McGee isn’t keen on representations of pods and tiny homes in splendid isolation, lording over vast tracts of pristine nature. He prefers the idea of “homes being site-specific and informed by their environment”, connecting with it and relating to it more subtly than the typically grandiose fantasy of having it to yourself.
Rather than a typical prefabricated pod, McGee developed a suite of designs with modular sections, so that each cabin could be configured to respond to climate, topography, views, and so on. He sees this flexibility as a “positive way in which settlement can happen”. The aim is for each unit to inhabit its setting “in the best possible way”.
His personal prototype is less a typical unit than an initial “design response”, as he puts it. One of the things that pleases him most is the way his first response — affectionately known as “The Owlhouse ”— fits so unobtrusively into the century-old garden terrace. “It’s very respectful of its immediate surroundings,” he says. He chose a 45° pitched roof with large, projective eaves, which resonated with his old stone house. The archetypal “tent-like” shape with its high gabled ceiling allowed for extra space to be created using a standing mezzanine level. Before building it on site,
McGee and the carpentry team built the house in the supplier’s warehouse and tinkered around until they’d resolved all the details to their satisfaction, before taking it down again and reassembling it on site.
“I loved the process,” says McGee. “This was the first time I was able to achieve an aesthetically pleasing, performance-orientated building in South Africa.”
He also loved how advanced the concept is in terms of its material sustainability and carbon offset, and that its solar-energy system provides enough power for the cabin and the main house. It embodies something of a return to the craft tradition. While CLT is a new, manufactured product McGee acknowledges that there’s “no escaping that it’s an industrial product — made by robots and pressed by machines”), he says there’ sa connection to carpentry and the handmade in its assembly, as well as in the protection of the material and its detailing.
“It’s more decorative, going back to something that has idiosyncrasies and personality through the use of craftsmanship and carpentry to create character that’s missing from a lot of today’s buildings,” he says. You can see this in details such as the built-in bat and owl boxes, as well as the weathervane that is there to conceal a joint.
However, the unit also allows “inhabitants to use the building as an instrument to learn more about their environment”. It’s another way in which the house enhances or amplifies the experience of nature. (For the same reason, McGee designed large eaves and didn’t add gutters because he wanted to be able to watch the rain run off the roof in front of the windows.)
Despite the pared-back, minimalist approach he’s taken in the furnishings, the warmth and the quietness leave many guests describing it as “cosy”. It’s a little too sleek and refined to qualify as cottagey, but this timber house has left its guests, its architect, the other garden inhabitants, and ultimately the planet, happier.