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ABOVE: The dining area is a post-modern space with its retro tub chairs, white modernist plinth tables and custom-designed reindeer-antler and glass chandelier.
Wanted House
At home on the edge of the Atlantic.
words and production Colin O’Mara Davis photographs Angie Làzaro and Gunther Gräter product stylist Guy Little
‘It’s not at all what one would expect judging from the outside,’ says Dr Guido Scholdgen of his self-designed Camps Bay villa. Likening the structural design to the oeuvre of Dutch architect and architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas, the frontage is a symmetrical, machine-proportioned assemblage of steel, concrete and glass.
 ABOVE, LEFT: Transparency and reflection are the primary design principles in this Camps Bay villa. Though considered an intellectual space, it is not without visual humour. The 2.4m by 2.6m pivot door features a hand-carved timber panel that resembles an oversized stretch of silver ostrich skin with a neon-pink egg doorknob for effect. RIGHT: For the designer gourmet kitchen, Guido photographed close-ups of various foodstuffs and had these printed on opaque glass panels as cabinetry fronts.
This is an intellectual, anti-intuitive space that challenges conventions of habitation – as if someone did the unthinkable and interpreted an Escher drawing in three dimensions. Nothing about this house is average, but then neither are its owners. The good doctor is an artist. Revelling in the avante-garde and flirting with digital-age aesthetics, he gained prominence with his works of ‘paintography’. The process involves large-format, canvas-printed photography that is then painted on, photographed again and, finally, printed.
ABOVE: The mezzanine level looks onto a 28 piece strong light installation of Murano glass Spoon Lamps. In the ground-level lounge, the white Dedon outdoor suite and interior tree suggest year long summer with private views of the Atlantic Ocean. Framed artworks by Guido.
Guido's wife, Annette, is a former model and fashion designer. Together they have lived, worked and partied in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Spain’s Ibiza, ultimately settling in Cape Town in 2004. The spirit of exploration is deftly expressed in the home’s transitory spaces. From the entrance hall, triple-volume heights and a high-speed lift invite the intrepid, where the ground level’s curved, freestanding stairwell winds to a pocketed bohemian sanctuary. The upper-level sundeck, however, is a short walk to the long drop that is the Atlantic Ocean… but the owners insist that there is no better place come time for sundowners. Eight hours later, they’re proven right.
Innovative, spectacular, confounding but still immeasurably cool, this is a house to make discerning owners and jealous neighbours alike.
ABOVE LEFT:This ’95 self-portrait, titled Le Voyeur, is simply signed ‘Guido’ and is displayed in the couple’s atelier-cum-home-office, amid collector-series Evian vessels. MIDDLE: Chandelier designed by Wilja Reitz. RIGHT: The fish in the home's pond.
This article is from the Top Billing magazine archive from April 2010.
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