Off-grid

Off-grid

Hout Bay is twenty-five minutes from central Cape Town and feels twice that far. The house was built in 2012 by Wolf & Wolf Architects to read the mountain through glass and run on its own terms — its own borehole, its own solar, its own biofiltered pool. The 2022 renovation kept all of it and added the next decade of comforts. There is a municipal road at the bottom of the driveway, and a fibre line. Everything else, the property makes itself.

Into the rock

Twenty-seven thousand cubic metres of granite were taken out of the mountainside to seat the house. The boulder behind the lap pool is the one piece that stayed. Wolf & Wolf designed the build in 2012 so that every room reads the mountain through glass — the slope behind, the ocean below, the cloud through the slatted timber roof above. The 2022 renovation kept the bones and re-cut the surfaces.

Photo coming

The water

A borehole eighty-two metres down draws the household's water out of the mountain itself. It runs through reverse-osmosis and UV before it reaches a tap. There is no municipal connection; in a year of Cape Town's day-zero droughts, the gardens stayed green.

Photo coming

The power

Twelve kilowatts of solar on the roof, paired with a battery bank that runs the house through the night. South Africa's grid loses power for hours at a time most weeks; inside the house, the lights never blink. The geyser runs on solar-heated water, the kitchen on gas, the fireplace on local hardwood.

The pool

Twenty metres of lap pool, biofiltered through a planted reed bed alongside it. No chlorine, no salt, no pumps cycling all day. The water lilies and the koi from the upper pond drift through the same body of water. It reads as warm in summer, brisk in winter — the way water actually is.

The materials

Iroko decks, the West African hardwood that silvers in the sun and refuses to rot. Zimbabwean Black Granite in the kitchen — heavier, denser, and quieter than any veined stone. Dry-stacked dolerite walls cut from the same quarry the boulder came out of. Slatted Saligna pine in the roof, dropping shifting light into every room below. The house was made out of what was already here, and what nearby places make best.