Living in Style

Homeowner and interior designer Andrea Kleinloog sits down with long-time friend Sarah Buitendach over croissants and coffee to talk about stylish family living

- Sarah Buitendach

How do interior designers really live? Forget the curated penthouse apartments of Instagram. If you’re Andrea Kleinloog, partner at Anatomy Design and HK Studio in Joburg, home is with her husband Luke, daughter Beatrix and dogs Meisiekind and Ron Swanson in the heart of suburbia. Add a lot of friends and family coming and going, kids’ toys and a trampoline, and you’ve got the real thing: stylish living, firmly rooted in reality.

SARAH You guys are really adulting hard! ANDREA We’re so adult! (laughs) With apologies to Talking Heads, do you wake up in the morning and think, ‘Wait! This is not my beautiful house’? Seriously, I still don’t feel like it’s my house. What was the reason for the move to it last year? We wanted to buy something that we didn’t have to do anything to, because we valued our marriage more than we valued any possible need for a nightmarish renovations project. So you just moved in? Pretty much. The house’s previous owners had done everything already. I suppose if I had to build my own, it probably wouldn’t look like this but it’s still an awesome home. I didn’t have to do any of it. All the walls were beige, so I just whitened up the whole thing and painted the kitchen navy.