Toy Box

This compact Johannesburg family home is as much a playful architectural experiment as it is a habitable sculpture.

Asher Stoltz says that when he and his wife, Gina, decided to build a house for

themselves and their two sons, Tokyo and Ziggy, they actually wanted something more than a conventional home.

There is something undeniably artistic – verging on magical – about the mysterious little brick box they built on a former tennis court in Johannesburg’s leafy suburb of Orchards, at the end of a long, panhandle driveway.

The 10m x 10m cube, punctured by a scattering of irregularly spaced and unusually shaped doors and windows – strips, arches and squares – was nicknamed 'the Shapesorter House' by the couple and their architect, Gregory Katz, because of its resemblance to the classic children’s toy. It’s not hard to imagine that the raised, black-mosaiced circular swimming pool – “Like a piece of liquorice in the garden,” says Gregory – could be a shape waiting to be posted through one of the apertures.

This light-hearted, whimsical house, however playful it might be, is also underpinned by some serious thought about architecture and life. Besides, as Asher says, you get to build a house once, maybe twice, in your life. What’s the point of doing something dull and conventional? Much of the room for creativity and quirkiness was freed up because Asher and Gina didn’t want a typically sprawling suburban house. They were after something that would approximate an apartment lifestyle in a standalone house with a garden. “We really wanted to maximize garden space, condense living space, and use the areas inside cleverly,” says Asher. Gregory is an artistic, intellectual figure on the Joburg architectural scene. He’s a Columbia graduate who cut his teeth in Daniel Libeskind’s studio, and has a taste for geometric games and op art. “The idea was that that Asher and Gina would have a super-efficient space that would be able to house all their lifestyle requirements,” he says.

He adds that what costs they saved in “gross square meterage”, they could redirect into higher-end materials and finishes, ratcheting up the quality of the tactile experience of the house, pushing the envelope with unusual details (and adding energy efficient tech to make it more sustainable, too). PROJECT INFO:

PHOTOGRAPHS

Elsa Young

TEXT

Graham Wood

LEFT: The dining area and kitchen occupy the lower level, uninterrupted except for a single bright yellow pillar where the diamond-shaped cut-out in the slab lets in light from above. The kitchen is a highly functional but bold presence in the living area. The semi-circular shape of the cabinet harmonises with the arch-shaped doors and windows, while the bright colours and bold geometric shapes reference designs by the Memphis Group and even aspects of postmodern design. The vintage Formicatopped table and tubular chrome chairs and Charles Ghost bar stools by Philippe Starke for Kartell, all show a keen interest in the wys in which material can open up new possibilities for design. The four-anda-half-meter-high tapestry is by Cape Town-based artist Renee Rossouw, commissioned especially for the space.

TOP LEFT: Asher is a keen gardener, and has largely designed the intricate layout of the garden himself, with its multiple “garden rooms” and separate but interrelated areas. He is also responsible for a number of the steel furniture designs, including the benches and the orange tubular planter.

TOP RIGHT: The faceted, pyramid-shaped skylight pours natural light into the centre of the house through a lightwell or “cut-out” in the firstfloor slab, which creates an exaggerated sense of space with its double volume height. Airbricks have been used for the balustrades not only as a nod to the kind of tropical modernism that influenced mid-century Johannesburg architecture, but also as a practical way of maintaining a visual connection between the upstairs and downstairs areas. (It’s also a functional, modular unit that makes for endless possibilities in geometric patternmaking). The plant trellises make for a pleasing inversion of expectation, almost as if the centre of the house were an outside balcony. The trellises and airbricks allow for cooling natural ventilation.

BOTTOM LEFT: Although the semi-circular arches are part of a geometric game of aesthetics that is one of the guiding principles of the design of this house, they have multiple layers of meaning. For example, arches are a classical reference, and classical architecture is known for its symmetrical composition. But in this instance, that convention is subverted in the asymmetrical composition of the house. Another dimension of meaning can be found in the use of modular components to create a larger pattern, such as the air bricks and the use of pavers for the walls, lining up the nibs on their sides for a pleasing textural effect.

“We started thinking about making the most of small spaces, and how you can make something small actually feel quite spacious,” says Gregory.

The square layout made sense because the spans are so small that there’s very little need for extra structural support. As a result, the interior, while compact, is open and flowing, uninterrupted by walls and pillars. It’s not just a knee-jerk open-plan arrangement, however. Gregory talks about the early 20th century Austrian architect Adolf Loos and his idea of a raumplan: “connected spaces that offer different kinds of feelings of separation,” he explains. It’s an approach that allows a remarkable combination of open areas that are nevertheless clearly differentiated, often by changes in floor level.

“The whole house is very interconnected and multifunctional and open,” says Gregory. “Even though it’s small, it still feels spacious.” Even the bedrooms upstairs seem part of the living space, with lines of sight up through a cut-out in the first-floor slab.

He also thought carefully about connecting the interiors to the garden, “creating interesting framed views of the garden that draw your eye out”.

“It’s not just a glass box where inside and outside are seamless,” he says. Instead, the scattering of strategically positioned “apertures” (windows and doors to you and I) helps create an illusion of space without sacrificing a sense of cosiness and containment. “The other idea was vertical volume,” says Gregory.

That diamond-shaped opening in the middle of the cube reaches up all the way up to a prismatic skylight, which not only makes a kaleidoscope of the sky, but also draws lovely natural light into the very centre of the house. The filters on the panes of the prism have been subtly differentiated according to the passage of the sun, moderating harsh light, while varying the quality of light throughout the day. It creates a wonderful sense of openness.

With its planters and airbricks, and the outdoorsy flood of light from above, the very heart of the house seems almost as if it’s outside, like a narrow street between buildings. “It’s almost like an internal courtyard with the bedrooms overlooking the living area,” says Gregory. It’s a house that inverts expectations at every turn. Yet, it sticks strictly to a set of rules and constraints.

The stairwell leading up to the bedrooms might break out of the 10m x 10m template they’d set themselves, but the floor space remains 200m2. “Because we carved out the lightwell, we had an extra bit of space to play with,” reasons Gregory. “So it’s really a mathematical game. You’re subtracting and adding, but still keeping within 200m2.”

On the outside, instead of regular bricks, they’ve used clay pavers for the walls. “They’re thinner, and have little ridges on them, so they give a very interesting texture to the whole house,” says Gregory. A simple, functional detail has been made into a beautiful decoration. It gives the house a “sleeker, sharper look”, adds Asher.

Asher says that the reddish colour of the bricks resonated with “Old Joburg” architecture. He’d hoped that there would be local resonances or regional references in their design – some justification for doing what they were doing where they were doing it. The little early 20th century red-brick arts and crafts houses typical of the city’s suburbs, some of them with beautifully crafted brick arches, were a satisfying historical precedent. “When we dug up around here in the garden, the soil here is exactly the same colour,” he adds.

ABOVE: Gregory designed the faceted concrete firepit and surrounding seating a little after the house was completed – an exercise in making furniture onsite rather than transporting premanufactured items to the site. The benches double as a clamber feature for the boys to play on and even as an abstract garden sculpture – a focal point from the lounge when seen through the arched window.

TOP RIGHT: The diamond-shaped cut-out in the slab creates a double-volume lightwell topped with a prismatic skylight, which floods the interior with natural light. Despite its sense of cosiness and contained space, the lounge area on the lower rung of the split-level living space connects meaningfully with the outside spaces in the garden via the arch-shaped doors and windows, which frame particular views and focus the eye on specific features in the garden.

BOTTOM RIGHT: From the bottom of the garden, the strict Euclidian geometry and simultaneously toy-like character of the house are revealed, reminiscent of the “shapersorter” that gives the house its name. Gregory compares the raised circular swimming pool, tiled in black circular mosaics, to a “piece of liquorice”, or a shape waiting to be posted through one of the apertures in the “box”.

A similarly thoughtful (and playful) approach continues inside. You enter the house via a door discreetly tucked behind a pink wedge-shaped wall. From the entrance, the living area drops down, opening up below you, and also connects with the areas upstairs though the lightwell. Inside, the brightness, the pops of primary colour and the general exuberance and design flare are something of a rebellion against the ubiquitous greys and charcoals that seem to predominate in suburbia at the moment. Asher finds them oppressive and clichéd.

Gregory, too, found ample opportunity to dabble in a bit of semiotic play and bring some complex artistry to the interior details. The marble treads on the steps between one level and another are a prime example. You’d normally associate marble with countertops, but Gregory loves using materials in ways that subvert expectation. He also loves using ordinary, massproduced materials, like the PVC flooring on the stairs, but elevating them by placing them in a new context. The “summer green” of the tiles on the stairs is unexpectedly refreshing, non-slip, and the circular motif resonates with the geometry of the house. Details such as the door frames were finished in a colour a lot like wood primer, wryly adding finishing touches with something that says “unfinished”.

Asher is a keen cook, so the kitchen was crucial. He loved the idea that the kitchen should function almost as architectural furniture, rather than blending tastefully into the background. “Obviously it’s very practical,” he notes of the kitchen design, but he adds that it’s also joyful, sculptural and interesting. The semi-circular cabinet references the sun, and echoes the arched windows.

Between them, the irregularly placed windows, doors and the skylights, allow “surprising and unpredictable” plays of light throughout the day, quite a magical effect. Often, you can't quite tell where the light is coming from.

The poetic effects of the light raise subtle questions about perception itself: how we see things; our own perspective. The playful inversions – what’s inside seems outside, what we expect to be used for one thing is used for another – upends convention and seems to free the mind and refresh the eyes.

But it works: without limiting itself to the rationality we usually equate with functionality. It has that something extra… something transformative, something that shifts your perspective. So, to answer the question, why build a playful kaleidoscope of a home?

“That’s why we travel, that’s why we read, it’s why we listen to music as well,” says Asher. And for him, it’s why we build. “It’s an environment that is creative.” A habitable sculpture indeed.

"We started thinking about making the most of small spaces, and how you can make something small actually feel quite spacious”.