Stefan Antoni, founder of South African architecture firm SAOTA, likes to tell a story from when the company’s Cape Town office was under construction. The roof was being hauled into place when he realized part of the view of Table Mountain would be cut off. Work stopped. The whole roof was redesigned so that the city’s iconic flat-top mountain could remain unobstructed. “To capture that view was crucial,” Antoni said. “If you had not, you had erred terribly.”
The anecdote captures Antoni’s ethos, which welcomes the grandeur of nature into equally grand homes. These are buildings that can make you feel like you possess a whole mountain, a stretch of ocean or an entire city through clever use of space and framing. Little wonder they set real estate records.
Its clients pop up in clusters in South Africa and the US, but also the likes of Russia, Indonesia and Nigeria, testing SAOTA’s expertise in a variety of contexts. McMansions, these are certainly not: a SAOTA-designed house on Ocean View Drive in Cape Town’s Bantry Bay sold for 290 million rand in 2016 ($20.2 million at the time) reportedly becoming the most expensive private home sold in Africa. “We try to tell our clients that good design has got great value,” said Antoni.
Now, after over 30 years in the business, the firm has produced its first book, “Light, Space, Life,” which showcases some of its most memorable designs. “(The book’s purpose is) to capture a mindset; a thought up to a certain point,” said Antoni, who also described it as a “springboard” for new ideas. So where could the South African firm go from here?
Structural gymnastics at the bottom of Africa
Antoni began plying his trade in the mid 1980s, when apartheid and cultural boycotts meant South Africa was largely cut off from the world. He says his firm rode the wave of a “mini renaissance” in a post-apartheid creative boom, but Cape Town remained in many ways on architecture’s periphery, “at one end of the world, at the very bottom of Africa looking up.”
“You are very aware that you’re not at the center of the universe,” Antoni said, “and if you want to make any kind of impact, you have to do something exceptionally well.”
Cape Town, with its particular topography, sandwiched between mountain and sea, and buffeted by two different seasonal winds, acted as an incubator for SAOTA’s aesthetic.
Dr. Philippa Tumubweinee, an academic at the University of Cape Town School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, says SAOTA brought an innovative approach to the country’s architecture. “It’s structural gymnastics. It’s very long cantilevers, concrete and clean space — which is not necessarily a new aesthetic, but within a South African context, it was relatively new,” she explained.
Cape Town’s sloping Atlantic Seaboard, where many SAOTA projects sprang up, also served as a shop window. “It’s quite visible,” Antoni said. “People can see (a) house, which works in our favor. Because if you design something that’s interesting or beautiful, people do notice.”
