URBAN GAZEBO.

Poised among the trees, this house in Cape Town combines a rational spatial and material sensitivity with a romantic approach to nature.

Cape Town's stage set topography forms a huge and dramatic amphitheatre. Residential districts clamber up the edges of the city bowl, grouped around the central business gridiron. Diverse communities, from the illfated District 6 to the Malay quarter known as Bo-Kaap (above Cape), historically occupied these sites cheek-by-jowl with upmarket neighbourhoods. Higgovale falls into the latter category. Half hidden in its steep and leafy woods is the Tree House, the newest and most ambitious project to date by South African duo Anya Van der Merwe and Macio Miszewski.

The house represents a committed architect client relationship established over several years. Newcomers to the city, the clients were responsive to Van der Merwe Miszewski's strategy. Their design dramatizes the views, and literally heightens the sense of being 'in nature', while also affording a panorama of the city. Teetering on a precipitous slope, it is a delightful contrivance, matching structural playfulness with a studied approach to the ordering of thresholds and elevations.

Rising from a winding road teeming with building activity, the disengaged street facade cheekily masks the body of the house, rather like a slightly too small towel at the beach. Addressing the street at mock urban scale, a monolithic wall restates the language of the town house, establishing scale, privacy and security. And almost at once it violates all three. Scale is distorted in two grandiose openings, one to mark entry and the second to offer a glimpse into the private realm beyond. Privacy is manipulated both in the openings and in the tantalizing views of the tree columns above. Security is pitted against enclosure; the wall is just the first in a series of vertical layers, which on closer inspection, form the house's principal ordering device.

The house envelope is rectangular in plan. A three-storey void drops behind the glass layer of the street elevation all the way from the entry level living area to the study and guest room two floors below. The living area inhabits the garden facade and overlooks the void towards the street, separated from it by a curvilinear maple ply screen. The tree columns rise against this screen, spreading their asymmetrical branches to carry the composite box-crate roof-terrace structure above, a plane oversailing the body of the house with uninterrupted views of the city bowl and bay.

The design mimics the paradoxically exposed but enclosed childhood experience of a tree-house. The interior is reinterpreted as a landscape, an artificial garden in which the living room is perched between the fabricated structural trees inside and the real pines all around, It reflects the designers' fascination with layers and the idea of a building's hidden heart, in which the promenade architecturale is a game of discovery, the home unpeeled like an onion.

Anya and Macio, the wife and husband partnership at the core of Van der Merwe Miszewski trace the roots of their Tree House to a concern with environmental design and the particulars of a place. The design draws out the spirit of the site in a way that brings the house into dialogue with nature. Oscillating between Modernist machine and garden gazebo, the building's nimble poise is at the heart of its charm.

Architect

Van der Merwe Miszewski, Cape Town

Photographs

Steven Inggs

1. Part garden gazebo, part Modernist machine, the house is a surprising presence among lush landscape.

2. Like a tree-house, the living room heightens the sensation of being at one with nature.

3. The glass and steel upper floors emerge from a robust masonry base.

4. Arboreal roof structure mimics and abstracts nature.

5. From the street, a monolithic wall restates the language of the town house, yet it is also punctured to reveal tantalizing glimpses of the interior realm.

6. Enclosed in a cylinder of perforated steel mesh, a spiral staircase snakes through the house, vertically linking the three levels.

7. Bathroom with master bedroom beyond on the first floor. Materials and detailing display a crisp, functional elegance.