The house at Shelley Point

The interiors of the beach house at Shelley Point – close to St Helena Bay on the west coast – were all about creating something utterly bespoke. This is a project that wasn’t about decoration.

‘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, which the building overlooks. In front of it, and about a kilometre away, is a tiny 19^th-century lighthouse at the tip of a rocky peninsula while behind it is the tawny, barren Sandveld that stretches far away to the Piketberg and the interior. The holiday home had to suit its setting as well as a refined client who appreciated – indeed looked for – the provenance of the objects around him. He didn’t want a ‘decorated’ solution.

Luckily, Zwiegelaar is adept at tuning into a sense of place and personality. To date, this has been absolutely key to his success. It’s what causes new clients to hunt him down with considerable vigour at his Bree Street offices. Zwiegelaar, who started John Jacob Interiors in Cape Town three years ago, already has a reputation for conceiving interiors that are utterly appropriate to both location and occupant. Shelley Point is no exception. No two projects are ever the same in the sense that his individual solutions each have their own particular style and character. ‘They can’t be the same. Clients have unique personalities and they want their spaces to do something for them, particularly, and say something that’s personal to them.

And so, in order to do whatever it is the client wants, I try to evaluate the project’s context – and I’m talking about the architecture as well as the surroundings. And then you have to manipulate those parameters to create the lifestyle the client is seeking.’

You can only do that if you really understand their personality and have a productive rapport with them, which Zwiegelaar generally has. In the end though, a level of taste and expertise are the common threads between projects and so far he’s made clients extremely happy.

The Shelley Point project was the one that really stretched the imagination. It’s a context that’s purely South African. So it seemed appropriate that two well-known local furniture- makers, Alan Lutge and Pierre Cronje supply most of the wooden country-style furniture, that a man from Vredenburg plaster the walls with a mixture of local sea sand and crushed St Helena Bay mussel shells, and that the shower floors be cobbled with stones collected from shoreline in front of the house.

’Lutge’s dining table and benches that he made for me from reclaimed yellowwood floorboards, and Cronje’s new-from-old riempie chairs look like they’ve had years of use out here, when in fact they were only made for the house just recently.’

They add a knocked- about ‘passage-of-time’ appeal to the rooms. ‘Lutge’s collections of Cape furniture and early photographs, as well as the South African landscape paintings that fill his shop, really inspired me to put together collections of local objects for my client’s house,’ explains Zwiegelaar. The contents of the Shelley Point interiors have provenance that the client enjoys. Best of all though, they avoid giving the decoration any sense that they’re a Cape cliché. They also have tremendous personality.

There’s a collection of Churchill-Mace oils of thunderous local seas, rough fisherman’s baskets from Hermanus, and a curious assortment of ‘found’ metal objects collected from sales rooms in Cape Town and antique shops as far away as Graaff-Reinet and Middelburg. As you enter the building through the front door you’re faced with a pair of whale’s rib bones mounted on plinths while beyond, hanging on the walls of the soaring double-volume sitting room, are rows of vintage farming implements and a giant clock whose hands are permanently frozen at 12’o clock. There’s a cast-iron lightning conductor that looks like an obelisk, some giant green glass balls once used as floats for fishing nets and an assortment of furniture that ranges from colonial to the simply comfortable. Nothing is randomly there: extra height, big proportions and exaggerated scale link them in a stylish mix that’s not lacking a sense of humour. Even the convex bullseye that Zwiegelaar designed for the space above the fireplace offers a skewed  bird’s eye view of the room it dominates.

This is a very considered interior by a decorator who never leaves anything to chance. The floors are reconstituted limestone, chosen because ‘it looks like the sea sand outside.’ Nothing else would do. The ironmongery – door handles, hinges, window latches – are a dull metal pewter grey. ‘The silver-grey inside a mussel shell is why we decided on that particular tone.’ The door and joinery paint is a veld green because here the Sandveld vegetation meets the ocean. ’People asked me why I did a beach house in these colours and not blue- and -white with pale, washed oak and loads of Belgian glass. Because it’s not relevant. You wouldn’t find this house in the Hamptons, not in these colours anyway.’

This house has integrity and layers of meaning. He hasn’t simply gone on a shopping  trip and indiscriminately filled the rooms with disparate objects. He’s searched for things he believes are right; he’s gone the extra mile thoughtfully, cleverly and with panache.

‘I believe I’ve added value to my client’s life.’

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