We were not the first architects to design their new home. Those who had been approached proposed a project of a similar size to that which was ultimately built, but, in the highly corrosive context of the Cape of Storms, it was all of steel and glass, in the post Murcuttesque manner, rendering it expensive, exposed too much to the sun, and crucially, not quite capturing the best of the views of the bay, and crucially , the backward view up and over the roof to the southernmost of the Twelve apostles, as the iterative western ridges of table bay. The husband, an engineer joined me in climbing out of a window, onto the roof of the lower pool terrace, over a parapet and to the farthest corner of the living room roof. From this point it became clear that the house sat at the centre of a cyclorama of mountains, bays, boulders ocean and sky.

The main decisions were made quickly, the house would be built of brick and concrete, a wall and opening architecture rather than a frame and infill. As much of the existing structure as reasonably possible would be retained and re-purposed: the newer part of the building would remain as it was, the kitchen and dining space would occupy the space formerly arranged as bedrooms. Its roof and rear wall retained. The main entrance would remain at the knuckle of the plan, but instead of falling away to the floor below the circulation would follow the view outward and a little upward to the living room and belvedere, which would be one space, half inside and half outside. These would sit above the guest bedrooms, which would open out to the garden in privacy. The existing swimming pool would be retained, a sheltered terrace held in the incomplete courtyard, from which a stair would rise, towards the sky, completing the circuit of the circulation. The retained portion of the roof, sloping down towards the sea was propped, and a new concrete box gutter cast in place to support it, was designed to curve gently upwards to open the space up to the sky. From the low point immediately inside of the front door, the new ceiling slopes in a single surface up over the living room, connecting the corner window, whose top frames in reverse the conical hill nearest to the house, and once it has traversed the whole of the space, folds up as a concrete plane, taking the eye back to the horizontally stratified cliffs behind the house. An even taller corner window draws on out onto the terrace, where the landscape flows through the frames of the architecture, connecting mountain to sea. A wooden deck leads back to the dining room, returning one to the start of the sequence near the front door. Here the concrete curve of the gutter/beam, runs with the contour, defining the circulation space overhead, whilst providing a long low bench between inside and out. From here, the view back up the slope is available, as is a view of the bay and its headlands, framed by the pool, the court and the two wings, the space of the house echoing that of the landscape- the house is about where it is.