Historic Homes

In 1943 my parents, Kurt and Lorna Hepner, then living in Parktown North, bought a 3 acre stand in Bryanston. The one they chose sloped gently northwards from Mandeville Road and afforded uninterrupted views of the Magaliesberg. It also had the bonus of a well, stream and large pond which teemed with birdlife such as red and yellow bishop birds nesting in the reeds and terrapins and moorhens on the water.

Unfortunately, the estate agent (brother of the well known Anglo American director Sidney Spiro) mistook the stand number and my parents found they’d bought stand number 511 instead of 512. They’d earlier purchased another stand on the other side of Bryanston, and luckily managed to do an exchange.

Steffen Ahrends was commissioned to design their house on Stand 512. My father disliked corridors, so rather than a long passageway with bedrooms opening off it, the house was much more of a square shape. It was positioned in the top eastern corner of the property so that the view down the slope was given maximum effect.

Steffen Ahrends drawing for Ponden House 1943

The roof was thatched and the upper storey displayed typical Ahrends dormer windows. The chimneys were covered with Ahrends’ wavy iron cowlings, also one...

I was recently invited on a site visit to The Kagye Samye Dzong, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery and Centre in Kensington. It is a remarkable and little known heritage house in this suburb. The objective of the visit was to enable members of the  Johannesburg East Joint Plans Committee of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, together with members of the Kensington Residents Association to meet the distinguished Abbot Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche (the Chairman of the Ropka Trust and Buddhist monk) and his board and colleagues together with the architect Simi Theodorou.

Isabella Pingle, a unique estate agent in Kensington, brings groups together that are unlikely to connect in other ways. She is a Trustee of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and she promotes and celebrates the heritage of Kensington; she founded the Kensington Heritage Trust which works closely with the Kensington Residents Association. Isabella has convened this gathering; we are all masked and observing Covid conventions but it is a delight to be out and meeting  heritage enthusiasts on a sunny July Saturday. The address is 34 Floss street, stands 7641 and 7642. It is a stone’s throw away from Roberts Avenue and Jeppe Boys School but it is a secluded, hard to find place as Floss Street turns a corner and runs to a dead end. The gates to the centre open off a cul-de-sac end of Floss and Good Hope Streets; a dozen cars already spill out of the small car parks in front and behind the house.

Ropka was founded in Tibet and is an international relief organization...

The American Government was assembling a site in Arcadia, Pretoria. They wanted the entire suburban block so they could build the largest embassy in Africa. One property stood between them and the full realisation of their plan, an old home called Arkleton belonging to Dr van Bergen. The Americans appointed an independent valuer to determine the market value of the property. Using all the correct procedures to determine the most probable market value, a valuation of R2 million was established and an attractive cash offer with no suspensive conditions was presented to Dr van Bergen. His first question was: “What do you want to do with my home?” “We want to demolish it,” was the reply. “Never!” exclaimed the doctor, “not for as long as I live.”

When I called on him a few weeks later to enquire if he would consider selling his home, he asked, “Are you here on behalf of the Americans?” I assured him I was not. He told me he was considering selling his home because he had sold his practice and retired. To discover why, then, he was so against selling to the Americans, I probed cautiously. What followed was a remarkable story of how a man feels about his home.

“My wife and I were building our dream home when an estate agent friend of ours told us a marvellous old home had just come onto the market,“ he said. “We explained we had started to build a home and were no longer...

You may have noticed a quaint stone wall with two decrepit wooden gates on Louis Botha Avenue between Acorn Lane and Death Bend. Or perhaps the row of magnificent plane trees just behind the wall caught your attention as you navigated this most notorious of Joburg roads. If you were brought to a stop in traffic, you may have even looked beyond the wall and the trees and seen an imposing double storey property in the distance, and wondered how it came to be built here.

Louis Botha Avenue entrance and stone wall (Brett McDougall)

This large property, consisting of ten Houghton erven (or part thereof), was consolidated by Mrs FM Bagley between 1922 and 1925, with the main dwelling being built during this time on erf 906.

No details of the original owner, Mrs Bagley, have been found, but the name appears against a number of Houghton properties in the valuation rolls of the 1920s and 30s, so it is possible that Bagley was a property speculator. The property was purchased by Mrs A Block in the late 1920s. Ann Block was born Ann Hillman, and she married Isidore Jack Block in 1924. The dashingly handsome Isidore Block was born in 1893, and educated at St John’s College, Houghton...

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie takes a journey around Lindfield House, one of Joburg's unique historic attractions. The piece was first published on the City of Johannesburg's website on 19 January 2011. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

Back in Victorian times the wealthy didn’t mess with security: they posted an armed guard, in the form of the footman, to sleep where the silverware was stashed - in the butler’s pantry.

He would make himself comfortable on a fold-out canvas and wood stretcher, position his rifle alongside the bed, and settle down in the tiny room. His job was to guard everything from silver teapots and teaspoons to silver hairbrushes.

It’s not difficult to imagine this taking place in the Victorian home of Katharine Love in Auckland Park.

Love is in love with everything Victorian, and has her house, Lindfield, stuffed full of gorgeous Victoriana. She is also stuffed full of knowledge - about the history of her house, the history of the suburb of Auckland Park, and the ins and outs of being Victorian, an era dating from about the late 1830s to 1900.

Her Herbert Baker house was built around 1910, on half an acre of land, like all the other properties in the suburb.
 
Love says her house was built for Dr and Mrs Stanwell. The house has been altered and extended over the years. In 1924 a partner of Baker, AJ Marshall, made changes. In 1933 Nellie Edwards, the city’s first woman...

In the article below, Philip Caveney from the Knysna Historical Society unpacks the history of various homes built by members of the famous Thesen family of Knysna. Click here to download a pdf version which includes footnotes.

The First Generation of Thesens - Mathias Theodore and Arnt Thesen of Stavanger and Knysna

Arnt Leonard Thesen was born in 1816. In 1845 he and his brother Frederick Wilhelm Thesen established the company AL Thesen & Co. in Stavanger. Initially they were merchants selling building hardware but later expanded to be general merchants and after 1857 were shipping goods to and from Norway with their own ships, notably grain from Northern Europe.

But this was not to last. On September 1868 an Economic Depression struck Norway and major clients in Stavanger defaulted on payments and business came to a standstill. AL Thesen & Co. was forced to close its doors.

Arnt Leonard Thesen decided to seek new pastures – immigration to New Zealand was considered. With help from the family and his elder brother Mathias Thesen, a sea captain, they managed to find enough money to buy the Albatros out of the insolvent estate and to load the ship with the supplies they needed to sail to their chosen destination plus a load of timber to trade to allow a new start.

They departed Stavanger on 20 July 1869, with a few calls to make at Tonsberg and Plymouth, but by the end of August they set sail for New Zealand.

They reached Cape Town on 16...

No. 43 St David’s Road had a modest start, being built for one Edwin Hawkes in 1908 at the time of the gold rush. The architect is believed to be Robert Howden who was known for being a Classic revivalist and whose work shows a Beaux-Arts approach. Hawkes sold it to Julius Wertheim sometime around 1915. Wertheim was a solicitor and notary and was very much involved in the community (an attribute which seems to have rubbed off on the present owner). No. 43 was then sold to the Hunt family in the mid-1920’s, during whose tenure the evolution of the property into its current form began in earnest!

The Hunts bought a single storey home which then proceeded to grow in parallel with the fortunes of the family firm, Williams Hunt Chevrolet (in old Eloff Street). It first gained elegant gables on the north façade, and then a short while later the entire roof came off and a second storey was added (with the gables being elevated to keep up with the new roof!) and the lantern was put in place above the new staircase. The grand Burmese teak staircase was installed running up the centre of the entrance hall and wrapping round to a gallery, and with American rosewood panelling downstairs and upstairs. This was all orchestrated by an Australian architect friend of the family, George White – quite a visionary achievement.

[[{"fid":"8275","view_mode":"media_adaptive","fields":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"43 St Davids Road Upper Houghton - single storey - via Andre Marais"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"media_adaptive","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"43 St Davids Road...

Morley House is an exquisite historic home. I first went there in the late 1980s, when it was a home and antique shop. Oh my... the yellowwood woodwork, red baked floor tiles, crooked passages, low doorways. It was all just so perfect! There is an oldish rondavel in the backyard, which I am convinced might have been the original kitchen. Since there are no known plans, it is difficult to be sure. The bathrooms, would have been added, possibly in place of the old pantry. 

Rondavel in the backyard of Morley House (Bev Young)

Morley House is one of the oldest buildings in Bathurst and dates from the time when the 1820s settlers arrived from England. The house was built in 1828 for the blacksmith Thomas Hartley from Mansfield, England by William Forward. Hartley had already built a smithy in Bathurst which he later turned into an ‘accommodation house’ he called ‘Hartley’s Hotel’, now the present day 'Pig and Whistle' pub. The stone cottage is one of the few buildings that survived the Sixth Frontier War in 1834-1835 which makes it a unique place to stay.

Old photo of Morley House...

On the farm Leeuwpoort near Heilbron in the Northern Freestate are two residential houses built for the Weilbach family, both Provincial Heritage sites.

The older of the two is a typical farm house of its time. It is difficult to establish exactly when it was constructed and by whom. There is one piece of information stating that it was built by Engelbrecht, the occupier of the farm before Pistorius and Weilbach. That would put the date into the 1860s. In another source, the year 1850 is mentioned. In yet another, it is reported that the farm house was built by Carl August Pistorius for his daughter, Catharina Johanna, and son in law, JF Weilbach, when they got married in 1875 (Pistorius is the man who sold Maccauvlei to Sammy Marks for an, at the time, unheard of sum of £15 500.  Click here for more details).

Weilbach hartbeeshuisie door with old National Monuments Plaque on the right (Horst Müller)

The house is a typical farm house of those days. The brickwork, I have to assume, is made from mud bricks. The only exposed surface is on the inside of the gable, but that is made up of burned bricks dating from a later repair job. In 1943 it was reported that the building was in ruin and was later restored. The outside walls are remarkably thick, between 400 and 500mm. Window frames, lintels above...

The Eerste Pastorie was built in 1850 in the newly formed town of Winburg in the Orange Free State of South Africa. It was a house built for the Dutch Reformed Church's Pastor or Predikant (the Dutch word for leader, in this instance Church Leader and is abbreviated as “ds" before his name).

Eerste Pastorie Today (Grant Hendrey)

In 1848 regular church services started being held in Winburg and the Church Council authorized the building of a church. A Pastor, ds Dirk Van Velden, was appointed and he was to arrive in Winburg in September 1850 from Holland.

ds Dirk van Velden

At the May 1850 Church Council meeting, the building of a house for ds Van Velden was tabled. It was to be built with the best building materials and with a roof of Tambookie grass. The house was built with 50 loads of stone and 40 000 bricks. Yellowwood planks and trusses were brought from the Cape by oxcart for the floors and roof. Unfortunately for Van Velden, when he arrived the house was not complete and he and his wife with 5 children...