Toy box
This compact Johannesburg family home is as much a playful architectural experiment as it is a habitable sculpture.
WORDS Graham Wood PHOTOGRAPHY Elsa Young
Asher Stoltz says that when he and his wife Gina decided to build a house for themselves and their two sons, Tokyo and Ziggy, they actually wanted something more than a conventional home.
There is something undeniably artistic – verging on magical – about the mysterious little brick box they built on a former tennis court in Johannesburg’s leafy suburb of Orchards, at the end of a long driveway. The 10 x 10 metre cube, punctured by a scattering of irregularly spaced and unusually shaped doors and windows – strips, arches and squares – was nicknamed the Shapesorter House by the couple and their architect, Gregory Katz, because of its resemblance to the classic children’s toy. It’s not hard to imagine that the raised, black-mosaiced circular swimming pool – “Like a piece of licorice in the garden,” says Gregory – could be a shape waiting to be posted through one of the slots.
However playful it might be, this light-hearted, whimsical house is also underpinned by some serious thought about architecture and life. Besides, as Asher says, you only get to build a house once, maybe twice, in your life. What’s the point of doing something dull and conventional? Much of the room for creativity and quirkiness was freed up because Asher and Gina didn’t want a typically sprawling suburban house. They were after something that would approximate an apartment lifestyle in a standalone house with a garden.
“We really wanted to maximise garden space, condense living space, and use the areas inside cleverly,” says Asher. “We started thinking about making the most of small spaces and how you can make something small actually feel quite spacious,” says Gregory.
The square layout made sense because the spans are so small that there’s very little need for extra structural support. As a result, the interior, while compact, is open and flowing, uninterrupted by walls and pillars.
“The whole house is very interconnected and multifunctional and open,” says Gregory. “Even though it’s small, it still feels spacious.” Even the bedrooms upstairs seem part of the living space, with lines of sight up through a cut-out in the first-floor slab.
Gregory also thought carefully about connecting the interiors to the garden, “creating interesting, framed views of the garden that draw your eye out”.
“It’s not just a glass box where inside and outside are seamless,” he says. Instead, the scattering of strategically positioned windows and doors help create an illusion of space without sacrificing a sense of cosiness and containment. “The other idea was vertical volume,” says Gregory. The
diamond-shaped opening in the middle of the cube reaches all the way up to a prismatic skylight, which not only makes a kaleidoscope of the sky but also draws lovely natural light into the very centre of the house. The filters on the panes of the prism have been subtly differentiated according to the passage of the sun, moderating harsh light while varying the quality of light throughout the day. It creates a wonderful sense of openness.
With its planters and airbricks, and the outdoorsy flood of light from above, the very heart of the house seems almost as if it’s outside, like a narrow street between buildings. “It’s almost like an internal courtyard with the bedrooms overlooking the living area,” says Gregory. It’s a house that inverts expectations at every turn. Yet, it sticks strictly to a set of rules and constraints.
The stairwell leading up to the bedrooms might break out of the 10 x 10 metre template they’d set themselves, but the floor space remains 200 square metres. “Because we carved out the lightwell, we had an extra bit of space to play with,” reasons Gregory. “So it’s really a mathematical game. You’re subtracting and adding, but still keeping within 200 square metres.”
DRAMATIC ENTRANCE Architect Gregory Katz describes the pink, wedge-shaped wall, that looks as if it has been peeled away from the cube shape of the house.
On the outside, instead of regular bricks, they’ve used clay pavers for the walls. “They’re thinner, and have little ridges on them, so they give a very interesting texture to the whole house,” says Gregory. A simple, functional detail has been made into a beautiful decoration. It gives the house a “sleeker, sharper look”, adds Asher.
A similarly thoughtful (and playful) approach continues inside. You enter the house via a door discretely tucked behind a pink wedge-shaped wall. From the entrance, the living area drops down, opening up below you, and also connects with the areas upstairs though the lightwell.
Gregory, too, found ample opportunity to dabble in a bit of semiotic play and bring some complex artistry to the interior details. The marble treads on the steps between one level and another are a prime example. You’d typically associate marble with countertops, but Gregory loves using materials in ways that subvert expectation. He also loves using ordinary, mass-produced materials, like the PVC flooring on the stairs, but elevating them by placing them in a new context. The ‘summer green’ of the tiles on the stairs is unexpectedly refreshing, non-slip, and the circular motif resonates with the geometry of the house. Details such as the door frames were finished in a colour a lot like wood primer, wryly adding finishing touches with something that says “unfinished”.
Asher is a keen cook, so the kitchen was crucial. He loved the idea that the kitchen should function almost as architectural furniture rather than blending tastefully into the background. “Obviously it’s very practical,” he notes of the kitchen design, but he adds that it’s also joyful, sculptural and interesting. The semi-circular cabinet references the sun and echoes the arched windows.
OPEN PLAN The downstairs living area is open and unimpeded by walls thanks to its modest 10-metre spans, which don’t require pillars for support.
Between them, the irregularly placed windows, doors and skylights, allow “surprising and unpredictable” plays of light throughout the day, quite a magical effect. Often, you can’t quite tell where the light is coming from.
The poetic effects of the light raise subtle questions about perception itself: how we see things; our own perspective. The playful inversions – what’s inside seems outside, what we expect to be used for one thing is used for another – upends convention and seems to free the mind and refresh the eyes.
So, to answer the question, why build a playful kaleidoscope of a home?
“That’s why we travel, that’s why we read, it’s why we listen to music as well,” says Asher. And for him, it’s why we build. “It’s an environment that is creative.” A habitable sculpture indeed.
