There is a moment, driving through the arid landscape of the Klein Karoo valley towards Mura Retreat, when the Langeberg mountains appear to rise up and claim this house entirely. The property sits in Lemoenshoek, a valley outside Barrydale, a small municipality three hours from Cape Town, but feels a world away from the bustle of the city. The building itself – low and plastered the colour of the surrounding shale – has the quiet confidence of something that has always belonged here.
It was a couple from Munich who found the land it now stands on, left behind years after a fire had claimed the stone house that used to exist here. They arrived with a brief that was as much spiritual as architectural: a modern take on a Karoo farmhouse, woven through with monastic restraint. Croatia-based architect Antonio Zaninovic remotely conceived the initial design concept but, unable to execute it from abroad, handed the project to South African architectural designer Marlon Leggat. Together with builder Stuart Saggers, Marlon modelled the home on an old monastery, with deep-set windows borrowed in spirit from Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp.
That subtle monastic thread runs throughout the house: a stone bird bath stands in for a baptismal font; the coat cupboards by the front door hint at confessionals; and a slim sliver of window above the entrance lights the cupola from within, the way clerestory glass might in a chapel. Orientation does its own quiet work: large windows face south to hold the mountain view, while the north side has smaller openings, shielding the house from the harshest of the Karoo sun. Much of the stone used for walls and exterior paving was salvaged from the original house – the fire’s only real survivor reworked into the foundations of what replaced it.
The house is generous in scope without feeling overbearing: seven bedrooms, a cloister, a yoga room, living and dining areas and a show kitchen backed by a prep kitchen and scullery. Marlon also took on the interiors, seeking calm over spectacle. ‘I wanted a sense of peacefulness, austerity,’ he says. ‘Nothing arresting, no bright colours. Here, nature and the outdoors are the heroes.’
That philosophy explains why so few artworks made the final cut. One of them is a piece by Jackson Hlungwani, whose figures carry an ancestral weight that makes them presences rather than objects. Outside, the spoor of sculptor Dylan Lewis, whose studio lies nearby, marks the earth, nodding to a history much older than the building itself. In keeping with that instinct, furniture was sourced rather than designed: primal pieces that appear to predate the house. A three-legged chair, carved from a single piece of wood by local carpenter Abel Zata, sits beside a grinding stone found on the owners’ land. One cabinet was built from the timber of old ball-and-claw furniture, with the original screw holes left visible. Nothing here pretends to be new.
At the heart of the house is the fire room – a single space built entirely to honour the ritual of communing around flames. It is very much the home’s emotional centre. Outdoors, an infinity pool holds the mountain’s reflection, the water turning the colour of the rock above it. Plus, when the sun drops, with no other light for miles, you can see the the stars. Its a fitting view, as the name Mura comes from the Khoisan word for the two pointer stars that lead the eye to the Southern Cross – believed, in San cosmology, to be the eyes of a lion watching over the land. The Western Cape is one of the few places on Earth where this constellation is visible year-round and, on a clear night, it is easy to understand why a name drawn from the sky felt right. antoniozaninovic.com; marlonjames.co; mura-retreat.com
