‘M

Y house is like a train station; people are forever popping in and out,” says architect Marcus Smit. However, when the white steel structure started taking shape in the small Overberg village of Grabouw, an hour’s drive from Cape Town, many residents were appalled at the modern industrial building in their neighbourhood.

“Most houses here are typical country homes — sometimes a barn style or thatched, and often timber,” says Smit. “However, over the past decade, people got to know the house and accept it. Today it is almost completely sheltered by the garden and hardly visible from the street.”

Smit designed his 225m² Modernist home as a pavilion that is set back on the 0.5ha (5 000m²) site, where the narrow 50m-long structure forms a backdrop to the garden, especially when viewed across the reflection pond — or “the dogs’ swimming pool”, as Smit refers to it. He shares his home with two Schnauzers, Luka and Flicka, and Kiku, a Greyhound cross. His father, Ben, has his own studio space with a separate entrance.

Apart from the generous size of the site — “great for gardening and peace” — and the quiet neighbourhood, it was the forest-like setting and its vast number of tall trees that sealed the deal. “It’s so quiet here; if I had to complain about noise it would have to be about the frogs’ nocturnal croaking,” says Smit.

“When I bought the site, there were mainly alien species such as pine and bluegum trees growing here. I managed to keep most of them during construction, but also planted a variety of indigenous species.

“I love the fact that my garden is wild and indigenous rather than manicured. It is home to chameleons, insects, birds, frogs, bats, even the odd harmless snake. It self-sows. I stopped planting long ago. Now, I just pull out plants and give them to friends.”

The natural landscape softens the rigid graphic lines of the steel structure, which is punctuated by tactile building materials such as concrete, bagged brickwork and corrugated