Anne-apolis

 Sometimes when looking through the photos of listings of homes for sale, I am struck by features that look out-of-place - whether because they give a shabby appearance to an otherwise great room, or because they look dated. If these are bedrooms or living rooms, these features can often be quite economical and cost-effective to remedy, whether for your own comfort or if you are planning to put your home on sale. In these rooms, the culprits are often damaged, faded or dated wall finishes - if painted, a new coat of paint in a tinted white would be my recommendation. While it is quite dramatic and trendy to use bold colours as an accent wall or even for a whole room, these can become limiting on any future plans for the room, and can negatively affect the perceptions of a prospective buyer. A tinted white gives a bit of character and liveliness to the space, rather than pure white, which can be quite sterile and harsh.  Wallpaper can be a bit more of a challenge - if it is sti...

  Last week I shared my experiences of visiting a  historical building  that I had not been inside for 45 years. After we had looked around Somerset House, the Heritage Foundation tour took us on a short walk around the area of Gandhi Square, down Fox Street and back on Main Street, where a number of older buildings have been rescued from demolition and given a new lease on life.  Gandhi Square has been an open space since the earliest days of the settlement, originally called Government Square with the first court house facing it. The square has a Blue Plaque commemorating the British Occupation of Johannesburg in the Anglo-Boer War. Later on in its history, the square became the central bus terminus and renamed Van der Bijl Square. I remember it well in the 1980s as a labyrinth of bus lanes and a visual cacophony of steel roofs to shelter the endless queues of waiting passengers. In 1999 the area was given a complete facelift, still retaining some of the bus functi...

 Back in 1981, when I was a final-year architecture student, one of my friends discovered a jewel of a building in the Johannesburg inner city that looked like it was imminently about to collapse or be demolished. Somerset House (built in 1906) had a glass-roofed atrium with many of the panes broken, and was being used as a shop for second-hand furniture and building materials, which were piled up throughout the three-storey building. The team T-shirt found among my heirloom clothes So three of us decided that it was urgent that we make detailed record, through photos and measured drawings, so that at least there would be complete information on the building that could be archived. Around this time, several historic buildings had been lost to demolition - to make way for the motorway through Parktown and other developments in this area, and down-town, the iconic Escom Building was imploded. This was  the tallest in the city at the time of its completion. But back to Somerset H...

When one lives in a warm-temperate climate, one is often caught napping when there is a sudden spell of cold and rainy weather, as we have experienced in Johannesburg this week. Our  houses are simply not equipped for the cold and damp, and are often very difficult to heat effectively and affordably. This is often exacerbated in older houses, when many generations of repainting the steel window frames prevents them from shutting completely. I have installed wall-mounted panel heaters in three of my rooms, but I find that they do not really make much difference on their own - one needs a more developed strategy to be really cozy when the temperature drops below zero. One of my panel heaters One of the biggest problems we face when heating our houses is that any warm air very quickly leaks out, under the doors, through the large panes of glass, through the ceiling and roof if the roof-space is not insulated, and even through the walls and floors. I am lucky in many ways, in that I li...

Yesterday evening I was watching a video on the work of the "replicator" at the British Museum, who has a fascinating job of creating legitimate forgeries. These have many uses: for display when the original is being restored or shown elsewhere; for teaching purposes (he said he has made 33 replicas of the Rosetta Stone); or, using the identical materials, so that visitors to the museum can pick up the object and get a feel for the weight and tactile qualities. The museum is always careful to indicate a replica on display, thus preserving the authenticity of the original and of the museum as a whole. Replica of the Rosetta Stone Creative commons licensed:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Replica_of_the_Rosetta_Stone_-_52052670338.jpg I had just been thinking about replicas and fakes in everyday things - much more mundane, but everywhere we look.  One of my history of architecture lecturers called this "tectomorphic" - representing the function of something i...

  I have recently been house-sitting in a home that is very different from my own in many ways, yet being there is a real delight. This leads me to ponder what it is that makes for the atmosphere that is deeply satisfying, yet is completely different from my own home. The first thing I notice on arrival, is the multiplicity of pot plants at the entrance - rich and varied in scale and texture, from cacti and succulents to frangipani and hibiscus. Beside the door are some wind chimes, made of thin slices of decorative stone that give a very subtle background of sound, less obtrusive than the more common metal ones. The entrance hall is huge - setting the scale for the interconnected spaces of dining, living room and music room, all just visible from the entrance door giving a sense of the flow of space. Light floods into this entrance space from a skylight above the wooden staircase - natural wood is the predominant material here, for all of the furniture as well as the balustrade an...