House Steyn

The clients are a retired couple on a wildlife estate, planning for two ways of living at once: quiet weeks alone, and a full house when the children and grandchildren arrive. Everything they need daily sits on one level, in one open plan — kitchen, dining and living under a single run of roof, with the bedroom wings closing off when the house is empty.

The building keeps the estate's rules and the veld's palette: pitched sheet-metal roofs, local stone plinths and face brick that will weather into the ground it stands on. A timber-trussed entrance porch — tall enough to shade the door in summer, open enough to see arriving game — is the one ceremonial gesture in an otherwise plain, workable plan.