Kloof House By Saota, Cape Town, South Africa

I grew up on a sugar estate in a place called Mshlumi. The one thing I do remember strongly from being a young child was living outside. As South Africans, we love living outside. It's not like we need our houses to protect us from the environment around us. We actually want them to be filters that allow us to engage in the landscapes. I thought quite a lot about how one could actually draw the landscape and draw the mountain into the space that we inhabit. The mountain is the big experience, and it was the thing that we wanted to unlock. This house is a fantastic house to wake up in, because you're almost sleeping in the garden. There are a lot of spaces that just feel nice when you're in them, and they kind of support you to cycle through the day. You wake up, you cook, you work, you sleep. Each of those feels like they're catered for here. The roof is kind of a fundamental part of the experience, and the way it's shaped and opened. Being able to watch the moon and the sun move across the sky through the roof has been very powerful. We think traditionally that you look out at a view, and you completely disregard the sky. But if you've got a patch of sky that's got no sun into it, you can look at it. And if you've got a mountain or a tree above you, you can kind of look up into that as well. You get a much more powerful connection with nature and its cycles. One of the challenges with domestic architecture, or any kind of architecture, is how you manage the way people can access the spaces you're in. You really leave the outside world behind you when you come in here.