The following brief history of Windybrow, one of Johannesburg's great historic mansions, was compiled by B.L. Grant and appeared in the 1979 edition of the Johannesburg Historical Foundation's Journal 'Between the Chains'. The house is now home to the Windybrow Centre of the Arts (previously the Windybrow Theatre). Notices on the Centre’s website and facebook page indicate that it is closed for renovations and organisational ‘stabilisation’.
Windybrow, one of the last remaining mansions in Doornfontein, was the home of Theodore Reunert, founder of the engineering firm of Reunert and Lenz.
Doornfontein was a farm which stretched from End Street to Bedford View some six miles and was owned by F. Bezuidenhout who bought it in 1879, paying a span of oxen and a trek chain for it. The son, Barend Bezuidenhout, gradually sold the land to accommodate the rapidly expanding town.
Doornfontein was laid out as a township in 1889, largely by the Corner House Group, and it is thus one of Johannesburg’s oldest suburbs. Many of the mining magnates who developed the gold mines and the mining finance houses lived here- the Ecksteins, Sir George Albu, Theodore Reunart, Cecil Rhodes, John Hays Hammond (later Vice-President of the USA) and others. In 1900 most of these people moved to Parktown.
The Reunerts moved into Windybrow in 1896 and named the house after the home of the poet, Robert Southey, in the Lake District. It was designed by William Leck in a pseudo-Tudor style of architecture. The fittings and furnishings were brought...
