On a Tuesday morning in the Fox Street quarter of Maboneng, the smell arrives before anything else — raw pine and linseed oil, the particular sweetness of reclaimed timber being worked back into purpose. Inside a double-volume workshop that used to be a garment factory, Sipho Zungu is coaxing a warped door panel from a demolished Doornfontein hotel into the drawer-front of a sideboard. The plank still carries its original cream paint in the grain. That, he says, is precisely the point. The imperfection is not a problem to solve. It is the material telling you where it has been.
Zungu, 34, is one of roughly forty independent furniture makers who have set up workshops in Maboneng, Newtown, and Braamfontein over the past five years, occupying underused industrial spaces as they became available through the precinct's rolling redevelopment. He trained in industrial design at the University of Johannesburg before spending two years at a furniture atelier in Porto, and returned convinced that the city was sitting on an extraordinary material resource in its own demolition sites. "Every building that comes down in this city is a timber yard," he says. "Most of it just goes to landfill."
His current commission — a dining table and six chairs for a home in Parkhurst — uses steel salvaged from a Fordsburg warehouse alongside Oregon pine reclaimed from a 1960s municipal building in Marshalltown. The combination required forty hours of hand-finishing to reconcile two materials of entirely different temper, but the result has a solidity that new stock cannot replicate. Collectors have noticed: a sideboard Zungu produced in 2024 sold at a Strauss & Co auction in September for R68,000, nearly three times the estimate. His waiting list currently runs to fourteen months.
Every building that comes down in this city is a timber yard. Most of it just goes to landfill.
The scene is not without friction. Several makers interviewed for this piece note that the same gentrification forces that opened these industrial spaces to creative use are now pricing artists out of them. Monthly rents in Maboneng's more visible blocks have more than doubled since 2021, and the neighbourhood's weekend-market economy — which provided reliable early-stage income for new makers — has contracted as foot traffic shifted to Braamfontein and the 44 Stanley precinct. "The city creates these conditions and then the market eats them," says Lerato Dube, a ceramicist who recently relocated her studio to Bertrams. "You have about three years before it becomes unaffordable."
What is emerging despite the pressure is something that South African design has not quite produced before: a coherent material conversation between makers working across disciplines. Ceramicists are producing vessels that reference the proportions of furniture in the same room. Textile artists in Newtown are developing upholstery fabric from locally sourced and hand-dyed wool that is specified by furniture makers across the precinct. The result is beginning to attract international attention — the 2025 edition of Design Indaba featured an entire pavilion of Joburg-based makers, and three were approached by European galleries afterward.
What strikes you most, returning to Zungu's workshop as he sands the final face of that sideboard, is how unhurried the work feels against the velocity of a city that rarely sits still. Joburg has always been better at erasure than preservation. What these makers are proposing, in their reclaimed planks and salvaged steel, is not nostalgia — it is something more demanding: a material ethics, a refusal to treat the built environment as disposable. The sideboard will outlast the building it was born from. That, at this moment, feels like a quietly radical act.
