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Exterior House Brick Siding Material Green Roof Material Glass Siding Material Design Photos and Ideas

The bedroom is elevated around five meters above the forest floor, and the space beneath has—like the green roof—been given back to the Bushveld. “Naturally, this space is shadier than the surrounding forest, so it creates a different microclimate for different species to flourish in that area,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “It’s an area that we have cultivated.”
Inspired by ancient ruins, Frankie Pappas crafts a green-roofed, brick guesthouse that connects deeply with nature in the South African Bushveld.
“The clients are passionate about nature conservation,’ says architect Ant Vervoot. “They know how every plant, insect, and animal fits into the greater ecosystem—their curiosity about the Bushveld is insatiable and inspiring. It really is an amazing thing to be around them in the bush.”
House of the Tall Chimneys is entirely off the grid. Power is generated with solar panels; black and gray water is contained and managed before it’s further filtered by the undergrowth; and potable water is collected from the nearby stream. “More important than these technological fixes, however, is the fact that the building requires very little in terms of resource input in order to function successfully,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “Careful design is probably the most fundamental aspect in designing environmentally sustainable buildings.”
“We asked Frankie for a home, and they built us a fantasy,” remarked the clients when House of the Tall Chimneys and House of the Big Arch were completed.
The guesthouse is located in a private reserve in the Waterberg, a mountainous region about three hours from Johannesburg.
The green roof was designed to give back the space that was taken up by the building’s footprint to the Bushveld and the animals. It is planted with site-endemic grasses, aloes, and creepers. “What pleases me one hell of a lot is that the building is completely hidden when you’re more than 20 meters away from the structure,” says Vervoort. “It’s invisible, and I’m super proud of that. The most important aspect of this building was to revere the site. I use the word revere because we didn’t just respect it—we treated this site as if it were God. I think we should do that more as architects.”
“The chimneys are in essence two big columns with some beams between them, and they look a bit like rugby posts,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “The crossbars of the rugby posts hold up the timber beams.”
A brick path leads through the forest to the entrance of House of the Tall Chimneys. “Bricks are a really cost effective way of creating space,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “Over and above that, when used correctly, bricks create complex patterns that I don’t think it’s possible to mimic using other materials.”
The entrance to House of the Big Arch is a nine-meter-tall passage, which creates a high-pressure system that pulls cool air into the kitchen.
House of the Tall Chimneys is the guesthouse of House of the Big Arch, also by Frankie Pappas. The two buildings share the same material palette, and are linked by a long path through the forest.
The aluminum windows are powder coated in a charcoal color, which is intended to match the shadows created by the forest and help the building further blend in.
The team lidar scanned around 40,000 square meters of the forested site to create a 3D model—including trees, branches, and roots—that would allow them to accurately determine how to position and design the building to have minimal impact on the surrounding trees. “We then designed a seriously thin building that could slot between the trees,” says architect Ant Vervoort.
The ground-floor living space looks inward to the courtyard and is protected on all other sides by the mass of the building and the blank brick facade.
A side patio leads from the front of the home to the courtyard. The same red bricks used for the facade have been used for the paving to create a seamless fabric that wraps the built form and the site.
The slim profile of the red bricks used in the facade creates a textured surface across the monolithic form, while red and brown tones of each brick create an organic, varied pattern of color.
The entire home is wrapped in a brick "skin" that extends onto the ground at the front and sides of the home. The entrance is found through a simple void in the facade beside a pond with floating vegetation that hints at the verdant interior.
Large timber-framed glass sliding doors open the kitchen/dining space to the rear courtyard on two sides.
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