House Antoine, Bloubergstrand

This project challenged us in so many ways, but rewarded us with an incredible end product.

We were invited to this project by our friends at Renov8it who were creating a brand new undercover braai area for their clients. Braai’ing is a pastime that our clients love to do, making the garden a focal point for them to spend time as a family.

The brief was to create a living area in the backyard that would be an extension of their home; meaning that the inside and had to seamlessly flow to the outside; creating tried inside-outside living.

The challenge for them was that the swimming pool was too large for the area, the garden was uninspiring due to the homes original and damaged stonework that had been in the home since it was built 2 decades earlier and the plots layout had odd angles making it hard to work with.

The plan – reduce the size of the swimming pool, build a beautiful state of the art braai, build a small roofed storage area and lastly (but most importantly) deck the entire area with balau hardwood from our friends at Hout Bay Timber Company.

We built a beautifully decked 60sqm pool area that now gave the clients an area that they could live in and utilise throughout the year.

A few features worth mentioning:

• 5 hatches – 4 for storage and 1 to house the pool pump
• Daybed – the one storage hatch area was built to a 900mm width to allow for a relaxing day bed to sunbathe and enjoy the summer days
• Planter – a large planter box was built against the wall behind the pool, to provide a backdrop of greenery behind the pool and also add some colour to the starkness of the wall.

This was a fun project that required a lot of thought, creativity and a fair bit of elbow grease – but so worth it!