Johannesburg architect Anthony Orelowitz has designed a home for his family that reinvents what it means to make a haven in the city.

WORDS Graham Wood PHOTOGRAPHY Elsa Young

“In Johannesburg, there is no mountain,” says architect Anthony Orelowitz. “There’s no sea.” He is referring to Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. Houses in Cape Town tend to look outwards, seeking to catch a glimpse of the ocean or frame a view of Table Mountain. “Here, you have to create your own habitat,” Anthony says. That, at heart, was the basis of his response to Johannesburg’s urban character when he designed his own home in the city’s famously forested suburbs.

The plot of land Anthony was to build his home on had previously been a tennis court accessed via a long driveway at the end of a ‘panhandle’, surrounded by neighbours on all sides and far from the street. It felt like a self-contained island with tall mature trees in a sea of suburbia.

BENEATH THE SURFACE Three “porthole” windows on the underside of the swimming pool on the upper level cast a liquid light over a covered section of the courtyard below.

To create his habitat, Anthony turned to the archetype of the atrium house – an internal courtyard wrapped around on all sides by the house, creating a peaceful sanctuary at its heart, open to the sky. He calls it a “self-contained oasis in the city”.

The house itself is essentially a series of pavilions, with vast sliding doors and screens that can be opened and closed to reconfigure a mosaic of spaces in countless ways. Anthony designed a new rail system to manage the large glass panels, which made up the sliding doors.

Rather than simply surround the central courtyard, however, Anthony describes the way in which he “pushed” the landscape through the pavilions and out to the very edges of the site. “The ground plane washes through the house completely from one end to the other,” he says. This, he explains, creates “secondary courtyards” all around the house, where the pavilions open onto private, peaceful nooks under the trees, and the boundary walls in effect become the walls of the house.

It's like a big, adult treehouse

Despite its long, low-slung appearance, the house also rises to create an upper level in the treetops, carefully designed around branches that lean into and over the house. It’s like a “big, adult treehouse”, says Anthony. The effect is a sense of space knitted together vertically as it is horizontally, drawing you up to the terraces as much as through the house and gardens on the ground level.

Anthony designed it “upside down”, with the bedrooms at ground level, nestled under the trees, and the living and outdoor entertainment areas – even the pool, with portholes underneath looking down into the central courtyard – on the level above. He says that when he wakes in the morning, he wants to “touch the ground” and “be in the forest”.

The clarity and apparent simplicity of the design is, inevitably, a wonder of engineering, ranging from massive, brutishly strong “post tension beams” that wrap around the house (so well hidden by cascading plants that you’d never even know they were there), to a floating lounge floor suspended by a 90 mm steel hanger from the ceiling above that seems to defy gravity.

Anthony speaks of wanting sensory feedback when you touch surfaces throughout the house, from the walls to the floors. He says it’s a quality he finds rejuvenating. The rough sensuality of the stone, the lushness of the plants and the elemental presence of the air and water leans away from the minimalism of European modernism in the direction of the lush, sensual tropical modernism with its early origins in Brazil.

WELCOMING WATER The pond at the entrance provides a welcoming coolness and the sound of water.

The care taken with the detailing means that the transitions between inside and out become seamless in a way that houses often claim to be but aren’t. The slatted timber cladding that wraps the walls and ceilings have door and window frames so precisely integrated into them as to make the thresholds imperceptible. The bespoke lighting is concealed and designed so that in the evening, the quality of light inside and out is consistent. The effect is slightly magical.

Despite the sleek beauty of the design, Anthony compares the house to Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter series of books, referring to the secret passages and trick stairs in the fictional school. He describes it more as a system than a set structure. “You’ve got hidden passages and concealed spaces behind spaces,” he says. The ways in which the walls and screens can be opened or closed in Anthony’s house means that it can also be quite magically reconfigured. It is forever shifting and changing shape. “It’s quite theatrical in a way,” says Anthony.

INTIMATE GATHERING An intimate gathering space around the fireplace relies on simplicity to create an innate sense of calmness; each piece of furniture working together harmoniously.

Some totally over-the-top features, like the app-controlled automated skylight (about 20 metres long and 3 metres wide) that runs the length of the front of the house, add to the magical effect, transforming interiors into exteriors. “The walls are made of plants,” points out Anthony, referring to a vertical garden the length of the first floor.

The interiors were an exercise in layering, articulating and complementing the architecture rather than decoration. Natural textures are picked up in the fabrics, maintaining the sense of grounded, authentic materiality. The colours are drawn from the water, the foliage, the sky and the stone to marry inside and out as one space.

To maintain the sense of simplicity, subtle variations in colour, texture and material – the same granite hammered here but sandblasted there – keep it from appearing monotonous or sterile. The patterned tiling on the built-in outdoor sofa in the central courtyard, for example, breaks the rules but introduces something whimsical and refreshing that rings true to the spirit of the place.

The secret, however, remains in the detailing, in being able to sustain a clear vision from the “big idea” right through to the tiniest detail. Of course, such painstaking attention only pays off if the idea is convincing in the first place. If it is, you have the making of an architectural landmark. The idea is elevated.

In this case, the idea was not so much to create a building or a house in the traditional sense as a place. “Can you make your home your favourite space in the city?” asks Anthony. The open courtyard at the heart of this home is an invitation to do so.