Dr Wamuwi Mbao: Barn razing

The zeal for newness has taken on a distinctly farmyard-like quality in my neck of the woods. When a house pops up for sale around here, you can time the order of things. Nobody, it seems, can bear to dwell in the cast-off shell of another family.

Once the For Sale signs are consigned to the toothy estate agent’s Polo, the hapless house is decapitated, the bulldozers lay waste to the walls, and soon what was once “Historical Charm with Development Potential” is now a churned-up field awaiting the installation of a new house.

My wife and I take bets on what it will be: Single barn? Double barn? Double barn with copper cladding? What’s strange is that, no matter the architect confecting the new build, it always ends up looking the same. The barn aesthetic is infectious in our town. You might find that your town’s particular design crime is the “updated” Victorian (where the update is a gauche monochrome) or an unfortunate fixation with monoliths that resemble the buildings in an office park.

Perhaps you live in an estate themed after some equestrian activity, with the result that all the front doors look like they were stolen from a stable. Contemporary housing aesthetics are very on the nose. The subtlety of gesture and allusion that characterises great house design is rarely to be seen. Instead, obviousness seems to be the dominant mode. Have you ever stayed somewhere on the coast and wondered why the design of your dwelling seemed to be doing its best to call your attention to the fact that you’re at the sea? A similar architectural make-believe persists in our little corner of the world, where someone seems to have decreed that every new house must resemble a farm shed, lest we forget.

It’s make-believe because the houses don’t look like repurposed barns. Building a house that looks like a barn is the epitome of false modesty. Real barns don’t have tinted glazing and a smaller-but-identical barn for parking the tractor. It’s simply an excuse to have a house with outsized proportions, a cathedral in “Antique Petal” that turns the streetscape into an odd, faux-pastoral evocation of a distant past. Aesthetically pleasing houses are the exception rather than the rule in most places, but South Africa has a particularly impoverished architectural vocabulary at present.

This bereavement of taste isn’t for want of interesting or exemplary forbears. Despite the fact that our national bad romance with kitsch has provided us with many warnings from history (ossewa-vibracrete, Serengeti-by-Sandton thatch), the previous age has also given us many sterling examples of how to build something pretty to live in. And it taught us that you didn’t need to aspire to that numbing suburban conformity we used to satirise until it became the inescapable reality.

Granted, the reality of an interesting house is often an ordeal of endlessly leaking flat roofs, interesting Australasian beetles hollowing out your woodwork, and the fact that interesting houses are often owned by people who feel as though they need to add their own flourishes (Why? Do they go to restaurants and “add their own flourishes” to the food they order?) — patios become bedrooms, landscaped gardens are paved beyond all recognition, herringbone parquet is entombed beneath hideous carpet. But some places manage to survive the assaults of fashion and it’s always a pleasure to read of a beautiful old pile meeting the restorer instead of the wrecking ball.

Think about the things that characterise interesting old houses: crazy paving; glass bricks; sunken lounges. My parents’ house, for instance, was built in the 1970s, and it’s a house you’d never build today because it has all the features contemporary architects sneer at: passageways that run the length of the house, rooms that are concealed and revealed gently, a ceiling whose infrastructure is invisible. It also has a massive passthrough separating kitchen from dining room, not because it didn’t occur to the architect that they needn’t put a wall there, but because they were thinking about how noise and social movement and light — the things that characterise how we engage with buildings — might be managed. Our neighbourhood had its fair share of fiberglass rock features and misplaced palm trees, but every house told a different story.

In one street, you had American ranchers (the style every 1960s and 1970s South African suburban designer clutched to their chest), neo-Mayan tributes in golden face brick, and at least one house whose owners must have been fans of Zorba the Greek. The street scene was varied and quirky, sometimes irrational, but never boring. Somewhere along the way we lost the desire to assert our individualism, in favour of a bland, Instagram-friendly inoffensiveness that says a house must simply be a vault for your possessions, in the same way that a barn is a vault for animals.

The Sameness Community has ridden roughshod over complexity and intelligent design, installing in its place an endlessly repeatable built banality. As pandemics and the worsening climate catastrophe do their best to remind us how privileged we are to have places to shelter, I’m reminded of the eternal need to find a more interesting answer to Mary Oliver’s famous question, “What is it you plan to do/ With your one wild and precious life?”

• From the August edition of Wanted, 2024.