MODERN THRIFT
Calvin Copeling has used bright colours and bargain finds to transform a ‘weirdly shaped’ heritage apartment into a perfect inner-city home
THERE are two groups of people who live here,” architect and designer Calvin Copeling says, sitting in the lounge of his compact flat on the west side of the Anstey’s Building in Johannesburg. “There are those who have to live here” because the inner-city apartment block is central and relatively cheap, he explains. “And there are those who just fall in love with the place . . .”
Calvin, who grew up in Benoni, fell in love with Anstey’s after moving to Joburg for work and living in Randburg for “over a year”. He moved into his 60m2 apartment in May and had just four weeks to renovate (the time between when the old tenants moved out and his existing lease would expire).
Although he’d originally planned to knock down the wall between the apartment’s two rooms — creating an open-plan living, working and sleeping space — the demolition would have meant losing some of the apartment’s original features (including two magnificent built-in cupboards, which had retained their original shelving and Art Deco handles).
So Calvin chose to keep and enhance the existing floor plan and do a few cost-effective, (mostly) cosmetic tweaks. In the south-facing bedroom, he installed a custom-built steel loft structure for his bed, which liberated the floor area for his work station and computer.
The second “bedroom” became a lounge and TV room with the cupboard converted into a drinks cabinet through the simple addition of a mirror. In the bathroom, Calvin removed the existing tub and replaced it with a shower, making the shower rails from copper tubing.
The kitchen layout remained intact, but it was vamped up through the installation of a new counter top over the sink area (the counter was made from one of the apartment’s old doors and an offcut of the same door was used to make a shelf in the living room), modular rubber flooring panels (the kind you find in a gym, which provided a non-slip surface that could be adapted to the irregular floor shape), and a careful restoration of an original wooden kitchen unit,
which “had, like, 80 years of paint that needed to be scraped off”, says Calvin.
Calvin — who also blogs about interiors and restores vintage furniture — then applied a bold palette to his walls: bright yellow, turquoise and even a pink, “almost like CMYK colours”, he says. This he contrasted with matte black chalkboard paint, creating interactive writeable walls, and highlighted with equally bright accent pieces, including a Hospice-rescued ladder (painted yellow and installed as the towel rack in the bathroom) and a glossy teal chair (from his existing furniture stock). He even painted the pipes in the kitchen bright yellow. “They were really ugly,” he says, “so I painted them yellow to make them into a feature.”
Most of the apartment, Calvin says, was kitted out with “what I found along the way”: a wall map of a random town in Indonesia (another Hospice find), a painting of the Joburg skyline purchased at the “side of the road”, two hedgehogs inherited from a cousin (he calls them “the creatures” and says the pair — a male and a female — fool around at night).
To the side of the lounge is a vinyl record player that Calvin recently had repaired. Initially he couldn’t find anyone to fix it. “My dad said I should just walk around town and I’d eventually find someone.” He did. One of his neighbours then helped him carry the unit — for four city blocks. “We have a really awesome community here,” Calvin says of the building.
Pride of place on the record player unit is given to a vinyl edition of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. Calvin is a huge fan of the singer and bears tattoos of her lyrics and even one of her face, on his left arm.
“I get asked on a daily basis if it’s an Amy Winehouse tattoo,” he sighs.