Houses built for the wind

The first thing you notice about Llandudno is the silence between the gusts. One moment the Atlantic is still, the mountain behind enormous and unhurried; the next, a south-easter is running at sixty kilometres an hour and the succulents outside are horizontal. Thandi Siebers has been designing houses on this coastline for fourteen years, and she says the wind is not a problem to be solved. "It is the brief," she says, standing in the half-built shell of a private residence above the bay, her voice raised against the very thing she means. The house, a series of cantilevered concrete platforms with full-width glazing on the ocean side and almost none on the mountain side, was drawn specifically to redirect airflow into the courtyard and create a zone of absolute calm at its centre.

Six architects are currently redefining what a Cape Atlantic house can mean, and they share almost nothing in terms of formal vocabulary. Werner Fourie's work in Camps Bay is glass-heavy and unabashedly maximalist — long horizontal planes, pools that appear to pour into the sea, a grammar borrowed from California but adjusted for a sky that is brighter and a sea that is more violent. By contrast, Siebers's Llandudno buildings are closed on the road side and almost monastic: high concrete walls, narrow entries, then a sudden release into light and the ocean panorama. "The drama should come from the reveal," she says, "not from the street."

At the other end of the seaboard, in the older, quieter fabric of Simon's Town, Liezel Loubser is working with a completely different constraint: heritage. Simon's Town's Victorian streetscape is protected under a conservation overlay that limits height, materials, and footprint. Loubser's answer has been to work inward — to excavate, to burrow into the mountain, to add floor area below grade and use the resultant thermal mass to cool the interior without air conditioning. "This climate is perfectly suited to passive design," she says, "if you are willing to think about what the building is actually doing rather than what it looks like from the road."

The material palette that unites these otherwise divergent practices is granite — specifically the rough-dressed Malmesbury slate and Constantia granite that appear in the Cape's oldest buildings and are now being quarried again after a decade of dormancy. Priya Govender, who works across Hout Bay and the Kommetjie peninsula, uses it structurally rather than decoratively, laying dry-stack granite retaining walls that become the foundations of her houses. "It is honest," she says. "It is from here. And it will outlast the buildings on either side of mine by two hundred years."

Fynbos presents a different kind of opportunity. The Cape Floral Kingdom — the most biodiverse temperate region on earth, and almost entirely endemic to this small corner of the continent — was, for a long time, treated as background by architects who preferred manicured lawns and imported palms. The shift began quietly, perhaps ten years ago, and is now irreversible. Neville Booker's houses in Scarborough and Kommetjie are planted with restios, proteas, and coastal fynbos that require no irrigation and no maintenance after establishment. "I stopped drawing plants," he says. "I started drawing conditions. If you get the soil right and you plant the right things, it grows itself."

What these six architects collectively represent is something more significant than a stylistic trend. They are, in aggregate, making a case for a coastal architecture that is genuinely of this place — that takes the wind, the rock, the plants, and the extraordinary quality of light not as obstacles or picturesque accessories but as the fundamental material of the work. The Atlantic seaboard has spent sixty years building houses that could be anywhere from Malibu to the Mediterranean. These six are building houses that could only be here, only now, and in no other climate on earth.