Off-grid

Off-grid

Hout Bay is twenty-five minutes from central Cape Town and feels twice that far. The house was designed by Wolf Architects in 2012 and completed in 2015 — built to read the mountain through glass. The borehole, the solar, and the biofiltered pool came later — added in the spirit of the original design — and the house now runs on its own terms. The 2022 renovation kept the bones 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

A great volume of stone was cut out of the mountainside to seat the house — the same sand-coloured stone that now clads the ground floor and the Guest Cottage. The boulder behind the lap pool is the one piece that stayed. Wolf Architects 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.

The water

Photo coming

A borehole eighty-six metres down draws the household's water out of the mountain itself — mineral-rich enough that we joke it delivers "the whole periodic table, on tap."

The power

Photo coming

Almost 30 kilowatts of solar on the mountainside, paired with a battery bank large enough to run the property through the night. South Africa has a history of losing power for hours at a time; inside the house, the lights never blink. The geyser runs on solar-heated water, the outdoor kitchen on gas, the fireplace on local hardwood.

The pool

Twenty metres of lap pool, drawn from the mountainside, continuously filtered through four different bio-regeneration ponds. No chlorine, no salt. 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

Garapa decks, the 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 mountainside they now adorn. 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.