OUTSIDE IN

The design of this modernist bungalow in South Africa was dictated by the trees on the plot and the desire for an indoor-outdoor flow

- Graham Wood

after several years of searching unsuccessfully for a new house, Johannesburg-based couple Toni and Graeme Twidale eventually found a plot of land freed up by a subdivision and filled with beautiful, established, indigenous trees. At that moment, Toni says she realised that what she wanted more than a house was to live among the trees. ‘I wanted to see green all the time,’ she says. ‘I wanted the outside in.’

So they decided to build a house that would be all about those trees. The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, well-known for his creative, often unconventional, approach. His brief was a bit of a ‘mathematical puzzle’, he says: how to fit the dimensions of a house between the trees? In the end, he devised an arrangement by which he slipped two long, slim ‘bars’ between them, with alternating strips of open space for the driveway and entrance, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an ‘umbilical cord’: a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site.