Penny Swift, Sunday Times, 17 December 1995
Pictures: Janek Szymanowski

The rugged rocks and stormy seas of Cape Hangklip inspired a remarkable holiday home.

For Ruben Stander, there is no better place on earth than Cape Hangklip. A relentlessly windy, beautiful spot on the False Bay coast, opposite Cape Point, this is where he has spent weekends and summer holidays with his family for 36 years.

This, Ruben says, is where the ancient, primitive world remains forever young; where grains of sand formed from rock and shell chips roll in the waves, adding to the evermoving sand dunes. Here, the moisture laden air becomes a canvas for unbelievable sunsets; the fynbos dances in the wind; rock pools become sea gardens; and the mountain invites an ongoing play of light.

This is Ruben's paradise.

"In my teens, I had a secret desire to be a sculptor," he confides. Instead, he became an engineer. "By the time I was middle aged, I decided I had to do something about it." And so the idea of a functional house, constructed on a rocky outcrop at the water's edge, which would be his only sculpture, was born.

He and his late wife Cornelia (a painter and a sculptor) had been holidaying at Hangklip, in their stone cottage, for more than a decade when he announced his plans.

Although Ruben was determined to build his dream home, his family thought he was crazy as he sat on the rugged rocks where he planned to build the house.

"After sitting on the rocky outcrop for several weekends, I decided I would build around the rocks without removing any of them. I knew I had to accept them as they were. I also used as much natural material as I could and made everything I could by hand."

Ruben's labour of love lasted four years. He spent every weekend building, with the assistance of farm labourers Oompie Dy, Dirkie, Sammy Boy and Aprillie.

Aware that the fishermen of the area had trekked across this land for centuries, he created a footpath, with narrow stone and concrete bridges, enabling them to rock-hop around the water's edge.

Rather than use bricks and mortar, he opted for concrete as a contrast to the rock. Additional stone was carried in and positioned in the mortar exactly as he wanted it. The house was designed so that, at spring tide, it has 270 degrees of water around it. Ruben Stander is a brave man.

"You feel as if you are in the bridge of a huge ship that is sailing out to sea."

He incorporated an insulating layer of waste rubber from retreads in his floors, and combined this with dune sand and a little cement "to ensure they are neither cold nor harsh underfoot". The finish is a mix of yellow dune sand from the Great Brak area (where Ruben holidayed as a child) and a polymer "so it would look like a sandy beach over which the tides had passed".

The ceilings, too, are cast in concrete, formed with the help of oregon pine shuttering salvaged from a demolished house. Not only is it a practical and cheap building material, but one that has left its textured grain in the hardened cement.

The roofs are all flat, and accessible, and finished off with rounded particles of sea shell, glued onto the screed with yet more polymer, to produce a reflective surface.

Stairways include an unusual spiral staircase made with thin slats of wood bent and glued together, and another made with South African oak, from old, felled trees he had specially sawn and planed. Doors, too, are handmade from oak.

The living room features bunk like seats made from salvaged oregon pine and expansive glass windows that cannot be opened.
"Due to the windiness of the area, there are only a few small opening windows made of teak," Ruben explains.

Over the gulleys, he built vaults and arches with round stones set in mortar, creating caverns and caves within the house itself. One cave was set aside as a wine cellar, another as an informal, open wardrobe.

When it came to power and heat, he experimented with all things natural. "I had solar heating, but the baboons used the sloping panel as a sliding board and broke it. So now I've decided to do the rash thing and get electricity."