During summer in Prince Albert, a little, old-fashioned Karoo town just off the N1 about four hours from Cape Town, most people are up and about early while it’s cool and the air’s still crisp. But by midday the searing heat silences even the geese squabbling in the leiwater, the water rushing through the irrigation channels lining the streets, and torpor grips the inhabitants – although nothing a cool beer or two in the shade of the pepper tree beside the museum can’t remedy. By contrast, winters, though sunny, are cold and often there’s snow on the magnificent wall of undulating rock, the Swartberg Mountains, just to the south. It’s an old farming community here, at the heart of which African Relish, a cookery school that has gourmands going weak at the knees, has spawned a foodie culture.
Whitewashed Swartberg House sits in a field on the edge of Prince Albert. Olive groves and vineyards, acacias, and veld plants surround it and it’s well fortified not against attack by wild tribes from the mountains but against the heat of the summer. ‘It was important that the house functioned well in the extremes of hot and cold’ says the owner, an architect who designed it as a cluster of contemporary-looking ‘boxes’ of varying volumes, some laid on their sides, others upright, all of them interconnected by transitional spaces defined by low or high ceilings and steps. There’s a wonderful sense of discovery as you turn yet another corner and find a view framed by an aperture in the wall – either a narrow slit or a vast square window that, when rolled back into its slot in the wall, lets in the breezes that ventilate the house and cool it down. Sitting room and kitchen/dining room occupy the bulk of the building, the roof of the former soaring upwards and lit by high clerestory window slots that direct the incoming sunbeams so that light and shade are a moving pattern on walls of the room down below.