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Inspired by her travels, vivid colours and the inimitable Karoo landscape, Terry de Vries has created a retreat she is proud to call home.
The garden gate that welcomes you to Terry de Vries’s home in Barrydale seems to sit almost impertinently between beautiful hand-stacked slate walls. The slate may be an authentic Karoo touch, but the cobalt-blue gate is reminiscent of Mexico.
Terry, a former journalist and long-time Stellenbosch resident, has been living in Barrydale since June 2018. She’s a bundle of energy, yet at the same time she’s also the picture of serenity. Although she has a BSc degree in agriculture, Terry is currently a transformation facilitator and offers yoga classes, labyrinth walks and meditation retreats at her residence, Kamala Retreat House.
In 1996, after lecturing at Stellenbosch
University’s journalism department for two years, the desire to travel took hold. The year before her son, Joshua (now a 29-year-old filmmaker), started Grade R, she packed their bags and embarked on a journey through North America in a GMC van.
Their nine-month trip included a stint in New Mexico, where she was blown away by Santa Fé. “That whole environment reminded me of the Karoo: the vegetation, the arid earth, the rocks, the hills. That’s where I discovered my passion for blue in all its shades, as well as a love for the earthy tones of adobe (mud-brick) houses,” she says.
But that journey uncovered another turning point in the form of a labyrinth in Rhinebeck, New York where Terry studied yoga. “I saw how it changed Joshua’s disposition from a fractious five-year-old to a happy-go-lucky child. I immediately started doing research on labyrinths and why people walk them.” >>
Terry loved the kitchen’s red cabinets with their reed backs, built by the previous owner. Her love of cooking and experimenting comes from her mom Renée who, as the rector’s wife, regularly had to entertain guests. The floating shelves provide a display area for crockery that tells the stories of family, distant travels and special friends.
‘This house was waiting for me’
Back in Stellenbosch, Terry persuaded the local municipality to allow those people completing their hours of community service to build a labyrinth under her supervision. After a few visits to Dr Peter Fraser and his labyrinth just outside Barrydale, and completing a course with labyrinth expert Dr Lauren Artress, she began presenting labyrinth walks and workshops. And then in 2016, Terry “went on a walk that closed the door to her beautiful blue house in Stellenbosch forever”, as she describes it.
“My artist friend Regine Kröger and I walked 2 000km from Frankfurt to Rome. Those three months with just a backpack were so liberating! I had no clue where I wanted to go next; I just knew I had to get out of Stellenbosch.”
In 2018, Terry happened to hear that “the house with the yoga studio” in Barrydale was on the market. “I drove up the dirt road and it was the last house on the right against the mountain. The beautiful slate walls drew me inside. The moment I stood on the huge Karoo stoep, I knew: this is my next home!
“When I walked through the red front door, everything I saw reaffirmed that feeling. The colours were my colours, the style was my style. I belonged here. This house was waiting for me.
“As I drove away, I phoned my oldest sister, Lize van Dyk in Somerset West. She started laughing when I said ‘Barrydale’.
Our late father Mike de Vries, the former rector of Maties, grew up here. Lize said: ‘I’ve always wondered which one of us three sisters would return to our roots.’”
The sale was finalised in April 2018. “I moved in on the winter solstice, 21 June 2018. And the house was perfect just the way it was.” >>
I love the sense of calm evoked by the stairs with their striking contrast to all the colour in the rest of the house. – Terry
Seasons of silence
After her 2 000km hike to Rome, Terry gave away many of her possessions, including furniture. “I accepted the fact that I was scaling down, but life had other plans for me. When I moved in here, it was fantastic because the house was a blank canvas on which I could paint to my heart’s content.”
Renovation work was limited to a new look for the bathroom in the open-plan bedroom upstairs, a corrugated iron roof for the previously uncovered stoep, and structural repairs to a leaking roof and stoep. To Terry’s consternation, this took an excruciating two years.
Now that the dust has literally settled, Terry is in her element. “I learned to love the Barrydale winters,” she says. “The snow on the mountains; the cold that hits your nose. I can make a fire in the fireplace. I can cook delicious winter stews with chillies and curry. I can even sit on my stoep with a blanket. In the evenings, I light a fire in the fire pit outside and gaze at the stars.
“The in-between seasons each have their own charm. In autumn and spring, Barrydale is enfolded in mist and only the mountaintops are visible. I swim all year round in the Tradouw Pass mountain pools. It’s cold but incredibly refreshing.”
And the best thing about living here?
“The silence. The sense that time stands still. Wonderful new friends. There’s a tangible feeling of tranquillity in my house and on my property. When people enter here, they become calm. I believe this atmosphere is what inspired my own realisation that this is where I needed to live.”