One of the most beautifully unaltered Edwardian Arts and Crafts 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 with her heart pounding. 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. 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!)
This story is from the August 2022 edition of South African Garden and Home.
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This story is from the August 2022 edition of South African Garden and Home.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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