An Architect’s South African Digs Borrow the Stripped-Down Look of Parking Garages

For architect Greg Katz, the design of several family homes in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs has served as a testing ground for his maturing practice. These projects demonstrate the innovative ways in which he tends to select and assemble the materials for his buildings. His own brand-new home represents the most recent example of this attitude.

At House Katz, on a balmy late-summer afternoon, Greg relayed an uncommon aesthetic preference: "I love the raw, pared-down visual quality of generic parking garages." There’s a wry irony in this statement, considering that he houses his family in a dwelling with "parking garage" ceilings, perfect for cars, but does not house his and his wife Caryn’s cars in the typically suburban garage. 

Greg and Caryn’s home commands a self-assured yet unassuming presence. Its street-facing facade presents a restrained palette of materials, colors, and textures. Concrete gray and the soft, pinkish red of its expressive brickwork inform the home’s overall character. A Mediterranean blue announces the slender front door and a punchy yellow emphasizes carefully placed door and window openings. Greg’s affinity for concrete was honed over a decade ago in the family’s first purpose-built house. Three kids later, this home is softer and more nuanced than its predecessor. It’s a fine example of the versatility permitted by a concrete skeleton. The Katzes’ house sits comfortably in the lineage of structural concrete-frame potential that Le Corbusier stimulated over a century ago, with the 1914 launch of his famous Dom-Ino concrete frame.

Always searching for fresh uses for existing materials, Greg came upon an unusual decommissioned bevelled brick. He used its sill-like character in a playful way for the home’s non-load-bearing walls. The result echoes the beautifully textured nature of the brick infill facades of a bygone Johannesburg era. Greg’s artistic use of brickwork is also synchronous with a global tendency to revisit the evocative potential of brick, one of the oldest natural building materials available. 

House Katz’s use of brickwork, even though precise and controlled, is playful. The bevelled brick is turned this way and that, accomplishing a crisp, pleated texture. This approach lends the home’s facades a fabric-like quality, evoking the famous German architect and writer Gottfried Semper’s reminder to us that some of architecture’s earliest walled enclosures were, in fact, made using textiles. 

Crossing the threshold into the Katz’s home, the no-nonsense aesthetic of the far-spanning "parking lot" ceilings is reflected in the choice of flooring. A seamless vinyl surface of a bold and dynamic chevron of blues and grays pulls one into the dwelling. The selection of this material was informed by Greg’s use of vinyl’s lively possibilities in his 2016 King David Pre-Primary School project. House Katz is a highly pragmatic dwelling, in terms of both the fluid layout of the ground-floor living areas and the compact arrangement of bedrooms and bathrooms above. 

Moving from the open kitchen, with a generous scullery tucked in behind it, one is drawn diagonally across the living and dining area. This area has strong ties to the garden through large sliding doors and via the transitional space of a roofed wrap-around stoep (as verandas or porches are called in South Africa). A generous fireplace serves as a pivot for the home’s spatial organization. At the end of our easy diagonal movement we encounter a level change of five steps. These take us smoothly up to a dedicated play area for the Katz kids and their friends. 

From the kids’ level the beautifully raw, hammered texture of a concrete staircase guides us up to the more intimate level of the home. Landing on the upper floor, the finish changes to plush carpeting. Here, the pajama lounge is the spatial knuckle that connects all upstairs spaces to one another. Two en-suite bathrooms have been inserted between two pairs of bedrooms respectively. The fifth bedroom, Greg and Caryn’s, with its own bathroom, occupies the north-eastern corner.  

From the upper floor we are reminded of the quiet presence of House Katz’s "little brother." This adjacent building, placed in the property’s southeastern corner, houses Greg and Caryn’s workspaces respectively. The restrained two-story lightweight-steel studio is fully clad in an asphalt-colored shingle, a material traditionally used for roofing. This unlikely architectural skin results in a shimmering matte finish, requiring no maintenance over its lifespan.

As the summer day fades to twilight, a gentle descent deposits us into the expansive garden. Here a secondary set of utilities are all stitched together by the primary constituent of all of suburbia, the rolling green lawn. These include the ever important braai (barbecue) as well as an eccentric triangular swimming pool. The absorbent nature of the unifying grassy surface is suited to the fact that the site is situated in the dip of a valley, close to a wetland. Equally importantly, the lawn’s blanket-like quality also presents an ideal stage upon which suburban life and all its attendant rituals can be celebrated and performed.

Related Reading:

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Project Credits:

Architect: Gregory Katz Architecture