Design Magic: Anthony Orelowitz's Family Home Takes Inspiration From Treehouses and Harry Potter

Architect Anthony Orelowitz has designed an imaginative home for his family that reinvents what it means to make a haven in Johannesburg, South Africa

“In Johannesburg, there is no mountain [and] there’s no sea. Here, you have to create your own habitat,” says architect Anthony Orelowitz, commenting on the geography of South Africa’s largest city. Houses here tend to look outwards, seeking to catch a distant glimpse of the ocean. That, at heart, was the basis of his response to Johannesburg’s urban character when he designed his family home in the city’s famously forested suburbs.

Orelowitz’s firm, Paragon, is responsible for some of the city’s most significant architectural landmarks; yet the architect confesses that he “[has] not done a house in nearly 15 years”. Nevertheless, by working closely with architect Elliot Marsden and interior designer Julia Day, Orelowitz conjured a vision of what it means to make a Johannesburg home perfectly suited to the city and utterly unlike its neighbours.

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Above A pond at the entrance provides a welcoming coolness while a variation in colour on the aluminium cladding softens the look of the facade

Above Architect Anthony Orelowitz and interior designer Julia Day

The plot of land Orelowitz was to build his home on had previously been a tennis court that was accessed via a long driveway, far from the main street; it felt like a self-contained island with huge jungle-like trees in a sea of suburbia. Day was involved from the very earliest stages of this project, so the ideas that drove the design have been sustained right down to the tiniest details. The interior designer says that working on this house was unlike any other she had ever worked on.

“Details everywhere were customised as we went along,” she says. Day recalls redesigning entire bathrooms so that the layout of the tiles would be perfectly even, lining up exactly with the doors so that no uneven size tiles were necessary. Designing, engineering, building and decorating were thus one endlessly changing experiment, evolving even as the renovation took shape.

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Photo 1 of 3 The curves of the Papa Sun sofa and chair are a counterpoint to the straight-lined architecture

Photo 2 of 3 The Gebrüder Thonet Vienna Targa collection reappears in the form of houndstooth-patterned chairs in the lounge, which also features De Padova furnishings such as the Mosaïque sofa by Piero Lissoni, LC03 chairs by Fabian Schwaerzler and Maarten Van Severen, and Ishi low table by Nendo

Photo 3 of 3 In a smaller lounge are the Cassina P22 Wingback chair by Patrick Norguet and Vitra Butterfly stool by Sori Yanagi, along with a tall sculpture on the table by Edoardo Villa and a painting by Fred Schimmel from ArtVault

To create his habitat, Orelowitz turned to the archetype of the atrium house: an internal courtyard wrapped around on all sides by the house, creating a peaceful sanctuary open to the sky. He calls it a “self-contained oasis in the city”. The house itself is a series of pavilions, with vast sliding doors and screens that can be opened and closed to reconfigure the spaces in countless ways.

Rather than simply surround the central courtyard, however, Orelowitz describes the way in which he “pushed” the landscape through the pavilions and out to the very edges of the site. “The ground plane washes through the house completely from one end to the other,” he says. This, he explains, creates “secondary courtyards” all around the house, where the pavilions open onto peaceful nooks under the trees, and the boundary walls in effect become the walls of the house.

Above The Hula chairs and Cha Cha tables by Haldane Martin are a playful update on John Salterini’s mid-century Hoop chairs, which were once ubiquitous in South African gardens

Above These windows on the underside of the pool cast a liquid light over the courtyard;

Despite its elongated, low-slung appearance, the house also rises to create an upper level in the treetops, carefully designed around branches that lean into and over the structure. It’s like a “big, adult treehouse”, says the homeowner. The effect is a sense of space knitted together vertically as it is horizontally.

Orelowitz designed the house “upside down”, with the bedrooms at ground level, nestled under the trees. The living area and outdoor entertainment areas—the pool included—are on the level above. The clarity and apparent simplicity of the design is, inevitably, a wonder of engineering, ranging from massive, brutishly strong post-tensioned beams—so well hidden by cascading plants that you’d never even know they were there—to a lounge floor suspended by a steel hanger from the ceiling above it that seems to defy gravity.

Above The wood finish on the kitchen island mirrors the aluminium element on the facade

Above Orelowitz’s psychologist wife Zahava has a study that subtly reflects her love of Eastern philosophies with the use of wicker and a lacquered finish on the Gebrüder Thonet Vienna Targa sofa by GamFratesi

Day says the carefully controlled palette of interior finishes was selected for its natural and highly tactile attributes. Orelowitz speaks of wanting “sensory feedback” when you touch surfaces throughout the house, from the walls to the floors. He says it’s a quality he finds rejuvenating. The rough sensuality of the stone, the lushness of the plants and the elemental presence of the air and water lean away from the minimalism of European modernism and in the direction of the sensual tropical modernism with its early origins in Brazil.

The tactile dimension and natural qualities bring a certain earthiness inside, enhanced by the daylight that enters the house, and the way that air flows over a pond and up though a skylight. The slatted timber cladding that wraps the walls and ceilings has door and window frames so precisely integrated into it as to make the thresholds imperceptible. The highly bespoke lighting is concealed and designed so that come nightfall, the quality of light inside and out is consistent; and the effect is magical.

Above The workspace also features the De Padova Tondo armchair by Vico Magistretti and the Ligne Roset Clyde desk by Numéro 111, with brass-tipped legs that pick up the wallpaper’s gold details

Above The staircase balustrade is designed with square steel planters that house succulents, transforming something mundane into a delight

Orelowitz playfully compares the house to Hogwarts School in the popular Harry Potter book and movie franchise, referring to the secret passages and moveable staircases in the fictional school. He describes it more as a system than a set structure. “You’ve got hidden passages and concealed spaces behind spaces,” he says. The ways in which the walls and screens can be opened or closed in this house mean that it can also be quite magically reconfigured. It is forever shifting and changing shape. “It’s quite theatrical in a way,” adds Orelowitz.

The app-controlled automated skylight that’s about 20m long and 3m wide, which runs the length of the front of the house, adds to the magical effect. “The walls are made of plants,” points out Orelowitz, referring to a vertical garden along the length of the first floor.

Photo 1 of 2 The master bedroom opens out to its own internal courtyard, and is furnished with the Elementi table lamp by Elisa Ossino and Yak sofa from De Padova, and an artwork by Candice Kramer

Photo 2 of 2 The master bathroom is furnished with understated pieces such as the Ligne Roset Estenda clothes stand by Busetti Garuti Redaelli, the Sen occasional tables by Kensaku Oshiro for De Padova, and a sculpture by Angus Taylor, placed on a wooden plinth

Day continued this sense of surprise and discovery throughout the interiors, particularly in the ways she detailed cabinets and wall panelling to conceal storage and even entire rooms. She favours low-slung designs, often light, fairly transparent pieces that do not “break” the views and the sense of continuous space: “there’s nothing that interrupts the eye.”

Natural textures are picked up in the fabrics, conveying a sense of grounded, authentic materiality. The colours are drawn from the water, the foliage, the sky and the stone to “marry inside and out as one space”. To maintain the sense of simplicity, subtle variations in colour, texture and material—the same granite hammered in some places but sandblasted in other spots—keep it from appearing monotonous or sterile.

Day quotes Vico Magistretti, who designed several of her favourite furniture pieces, some of which are included in the house: “Simplicity is the hardest thing to obtain.” It’s an effect more than a set of rules. The secret, however, remains in the detailing, in being able to sustain a clear vision from the “big idea” right through to the tiniest detail. “Can you make your home your favourite space in the city?” asks Orelowitz. The open courtyard at the heart of this abode is an invitation to do so

Above The plants form a living curtain that cleverly conceals the massive steel beams that enable the light and open quality of the architecture

Above This guest room is connected to a beautifully planted bathroom, which can be completely opened to the sky via an app-controlled, automated skylight