Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture

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Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture

Information

  • Completion year: 2011
  • Gross Built up Area: 650sqm
  • Project Location: Western Cape
  • Country: South Africa
  • Lead Architects/Designer: George Elphick
  • Design Team: George Elphick
  • Engineering: NJV Consulting
  • Structural Consultants: NJV Consulting
  • Project Manager: Brandbild Construction
  • Collaborators: Apocalypse Mechanical Monsters
  • Photo Credits: Dennis Guichard
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Excerpt: Rooiels House, designed by Elphick Proome Architecture, is a single-space vacation house that fully embraces the remarkable seaside location. Capitalizing on its unique context with panoramic views across the Atlantic Ocean, the house is thus conceived as a minimal steel framed glass box with a hull shaped hardwood clad roof to facilitate distant views to the surrounding mountains.

Project Description

[Text as submitted by architect] This vacation beach house located near Cape Town South Africa, is carefully crafted to respond directly to the brief from the client, a maverick businessman from Johannesburg. Primary requirements were to create an extraordinary living experience, conceptually capture the client’s brief to create a single space vacation house and fully embrace the remarkable seaside location.

Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Elphick Proome Architecture
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Elphick Proome Architecture
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Elphick Proome Architecture

Capitalizing on its unique context with panoramic views across the Atlantic Ocean, the house is thus conceived as a minimal steel framed glass box with a hull shaped hardwood clad roof to facilitate distant views to the surrounding mountains. All the external walls are frameless sliding folding glass doors and are filtered by slatted hardwood shutters which open hydraulically to become verandas when open and a continuous secure screen when closed.

To ensure minimum environmental intrusion to the sensitive fynbos vegetation and dunes that form the site, the house is elevated to allow the fynbos to be extended under its footprint. All interior walls dividing living and sleeping spaces are sliding ash clad doors which slide away during daytime hours to create a single large living space which flows out on all four edges on to broad cantilevered decks made of Garapa hardwood.

Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard

The effect created is thus an umbrella, connecting isotropically to the amazing environment that cradles the house. This building significantly evolves the seaside vacation house typology by dematerializing the notion of cellular space, burring the traditional regime of private and semi-private space and offering variant connection and refuge.

Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard

The house is counterpointed by a freestanding elevated pool and subterranean entry court and garage clad in unhewn beach stone and Garapa. The elongated pavilion with a floating curvilinear roof displays a minimal architectural language rendered in steel, glass, raw concrete and all powerfully juxtaposed with warm hardwoods deployed in the ceilings, furniture and all joinery to deliver an extraordinary outcome.

Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard
Rooiels House | Elphick Proome Architecture
© Dennis Guichard

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