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Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners
Rooiels Beach House,  | International Design Awards Winners

Rooiels Beach House

Lead DesignersGeorge Elphick
Prize(s)Honorable Mention
Entry Description

This 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 idea of a single space house and fully embrace 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 timber 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 timber 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 slide away during daytime hours to create a single large living space which flows out on all four edges on to broad cantilevered decks. 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. The house is counterpointed by a freestanding elevated pool and subterranean entry court and garage clad in unhewn beach stone. The elongated pavilion with a floating curvilinear roof displays a minimal architectural language rendered in steel, glass, various textures of raw concrete and all juxtaposed with a warm hardwood deployed in the ceilings, furniture and joinery to deliver an extraordinary outcome.