FAMILY COMES FIRST
For his own young family, designer Nic Criticos revamped a dark, dated Victorian house on Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard into an airy, light-filled home. The result is a great balance between Nic’s slick aesthetic sensibilities and more child-friendly cons
A bright yellow wall makes Noah’s bedroom the definition of cheerfulness, and colourful toys on the shelves of his sister Stella’s bedroom suggest flights of fantasy and fun
AT 2003’s first showing of this run-down Fresnaye Victorian home, with its many original ornate features and flourishes, ’70s additions like the mustard-coloured bathroom and poky spaces, it’s hard to imagine less likely second viewers, let alone buyers, than Nic Criticos and Lori Cohen.
A trained architect and national head of store design for one of South Africa’s largest up-market retailers, Nic is every inch an unapologetic, die-hard disciple of a particularly fundamental form of cutting edge, contemporary design. And it’s serious. For him, Philippe Starck is “too tongue-in-cheek”.
Nic’s design philosophy is informed rather by Norman Foster (the man “who gave modernism its good name back”), Tom Dixon (outspoken proponent of expressive reductionism), and David Chipperfield (known for his signature modern austerity).
A Victorian home couldn’t have been further from Nic’s dream, yet he found he had to have this one. The engaged couple put in an acceptable offer that very day.
“I’m certainly not an active fan of Victorian architecture,” says Nic. “But I had to admit: this felt like a ‘real house’. It was freestanding, where most homes in the area are not, it had good bones and it had definite integrity. It had barely been touched and I could immediately see it had great potential.”
As he speaks, one-year-old Stella sits happily munching on a piece of cucumber at the dining table while Lori, a magazine editor and writer, coaxes five-year-old Noah to swop his Batman pajamas for daywear. “Nic doesn’t tell me how to write, and I don’t tell him how to design,” says Lori.
“Or that’s what he always says. He’s definitely the one