HEART OF STONE

An opulent Edwardian home on Johannesburg's Westcliff Ridge provides the perfect setting for the romantic, eclectic style of its vintage fashion connoisseur owner.

- GRAHAM WOOD

Stonecrest - one of the most beautifully unaltered Edwardian homes on the Westcliff Ridge in Johannesburg - is named after the carved stone crest high on its red brick façade. Set above two tall, gracefully arched windows, the crest features a sleek, noble-looking hound at its centre.

"One early owner, I was told, had 17 dogs," says Annabelle Desfontaines, who has lived there for the past 30-odd years and can still remember walking up the driveway for the first time as a young woman. She has a couple of hounds who look very similar to the one on the crest, which adds a strange sense of timelessness to the way she and her family inhabit Stonecrest - it seems they could always have been here. Her beautifully eclectic style only adds to the effect.

The house was built in 1902 and, although it had a few alterations along the way - by none other than the master of colonial architecture, Herbert Baker, in 1911 and later, in 1935, by Cowin & Ellis - retains the spirit of its age.

It's a classical colonial Arts and Crafts mansion - part country pile, part suburban grande dame, part castle on a hill. From a plinth of local stone (the architects at the time celebrated earthy, honest local materials and handcrafted details), the house rises with a broad layer of red brick and a strip of stippled Tyrolean topped with a slate roof. The terraced gardens fall away so that the bedrooms seem as if they're among the treetops and the views carry the eye over Joburg's urban forest. (The Randlords - Johannesburg's instantly rich turn-of-the-century mining magnets, moguls and captains of industry and commerce, for whom these grand houses were built, liked to feel they were masters of all they surveyed.)