Written By Amelia Siminow, House and Garden June 2009
Ask a designer to define his signature style, and his answer will most certainly be that; yes, he has a certain ‘look’ that is identifiable but that on the whole, he attempts to keep things different and ultimately avoid the dreaded pigeon-hole effect. Continue reading
Conde Nast Traveller 2009
When you first drive onto Mark and Sarah Tompkins’s 28,000-hectare Samara Private Game Reserve (once 11 farms) in the Great Karoo, your heart sinks a little. There’s a lot of scrub, and seemingly little else. But once you enter this house, with four en-suite bedrooms, your spirits lift. Continue reading
Written By Jessica Kiddle, House and Garden November 2008
When this spacious Durbanville abode welcomed in its new owner it was in need of a renovation. And a new look, which was to be a French boudoir style full of dainty detailing and feminine frills. Continue reading
Written By Bradley van den Berg, Top Billing September 2008
A colonial sensibility creates a stylish gentleman’s retreat.
‘I wanted to create a bathroom that felt like a bedroom,’ says interior designer John Jacob. Two years ago he transformed one of his smaller bedrooms into a bathroom. Continue reading
Written By Malaika Byng, House and Garden May 2008
A decorator’s home is probably their best experimental canvas. It can serve as a private theatre set in which to bring alive ideas and inspirations or a place with geometrics and scale. Continue reading
Written By Paul Duncan, House and Garden February 2008
This is not a ‘decorated’ house. It was really all about procurement, says decorator, John Jacob Zwiegelaar, of the two years he spent hunting for items to contextualise the house for a client who had spent happy childhood summers on the once deserted beach, Continue reading
Written By Louise McCann, Elle Decoration May
In the three years since he opened his design business, John Jacob Interiors in Cape Town’s Bree Street, this talented 31-year old has garnered an impressive portfolio of high profiled assignments. Continue reading
Written By Katya Lea, Food and Home July 2007
John Zwiegelaar’s home is located in the heart of Bantry Bay, perched midway between the ocean and Lion’s Head, and right in the hub of Cape Town’s cosmopolitan Atlantic Seaboard. Continue reading
Written by – Paul Duncan, Down South Two
Samara Private Game Reserve is near Graaff-Reinet, on the edge of the Plains of Camdeboo. It’s a place where the Khoisan (or Bushmen) once lived, and it’s a landscape once heavily populated with plains game – lion elephant and cheetah – most of which were wiped out by early pioneers. Continue reading
Written by – Paul Duncan, Down South Two
Klein Doornrivier is an old whitewashed homestead at the heart of a once flourishing fruit farm situated somewhere between Barrydale and Calitzdorp in the little Karoo. It’s surrounded by a huge werf that’s enclosed by a dry-stone wall, and it once straddled the old wagon road to the interior. Continue reading