A traditional rondavel in South Africa is of great importance, it is a link into our ancestry, our originality.

Most people will never truly understand why our ancestors chose to build difficult round structures instead of easy squares, but a few spiritual ones understands their spiritual significance, which is why we still use  them today.  

So it was very exciting for us when the client came with a request for a home inspired by these structures, African Rondavels. The client briefing was solely based on its functionality, the programme, and as for the structure they wanted the original perfect circle rondavel. Other structures or features were to be detached from the house itself in order for the main round structure to remain pure. Understanding the functionality of a family home, and their family life expectancy we just knew this was something they’ll regret at the end.  

As seen when you travel the rural villages, traditional African rondavels by their nature are more like tigers in the animal kingdom, they stand alone...they have a spirit of solitude. That is why rural homes are a number  of structures in unity housing a whole clan.  

But this was a home to be built around a modern family life in the rural, so a gigantic rondavel with a number of detached structures all attempting to function as a single structure was a vision from a client who proved to have no experience whatsoever living in the rural. Living on the countryside is very different from a township life, visiting once in a while is like going camping. But the mistake you can make is taking all the  excitement and mysteries of that short lived experience camping and thinking it will just be the same if you  were to move there permanently. It’s very overwhelming, to modern “Africans”...it’s just a little bit too much Africa for them.  

The greatest challenge we faced was to create a design that will allow the main structures to be isolated, find a way to fuse them together to create a single structure called a home, and importantly to make them relate to one another.  

The result was a beautiful home design made up of three design styles; with two detached rondavels, a twin structured barns, connected by a flat roof structures to enable visual isolation of all structures via roof styles and pitches. The relations of all structures was created by first giving the main rondavel a gabled facade, which made cousins with the twin barns; and also having the flat roof structure to connect the twin barns themselves, which enabled the second rondavel to also connect with the twin barns.  

Another great benefit of the flat roof structures was their glazing, which ushered in modernity that perfectly blended in with the traditional structures, all fusing together in harmony to create a beautiful contemporary family home which is a testament that:

“All Beautiful Things In Nature Have Curves”