No matter how grand a home is, if it lacks soul it leaves you unchanged. Soul is what brings a home to life, what leaves an impression, and few know how to fashion it as well as Véronique Savigné. The style maven and global wanderer has infused a string of homes with her particular brand of ambiance. Richly hued and patinaed, her latest home in Bishopscourt echoes the spirit of its predecessors. A sense of authenticity – carried over in the form of antiques, art and curiosities – has long crossed the threshold into her successive homes.
Gazing at Devil’s Peak and Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden through an endless canopy of trees, Savigné’s home conceals its generous scale within an intimate, U-shaped layout, enveloping a lush courtyard at its nexus. Shouldered by wings of bedrooms – three upstairs for Savigné and her children, three downstairs for her guests – the heart of the home is where the ebb of life unfolds. From here, her open kitchen, bar and dining area tumble out to the courtyard on one side and to a long veranda on the other.
“It was a wonderful house when I bought it,” she recalls, “but it needed some serious shaking up.” She and architect Craig Kaplan went about “unbuttoning” the space, softening hard edges and suffusing it with an air of laid-back warmth. “We didn’t evolve to step out of the cave and straight into the open savannah,” she notes, alluding to the importance of transitional spaces in her homemaking.
In honor of this philosophy, a series of in-between spaces were conceived. Namely, the leafy courtyard that facilitates conversations around the firepit, a new veranda – completely enclosed in glass and thus immune to weather changes – plus an alfresco one that calls for long lunches in the dappled shade of a creeping vine. Each offers a blended experience, not fully out but sheltered, embraced or contained.
“Nourishing” is a word that Savigné echoes when describing her home, nodding to her inclination for feel-good interiors. To this end, the bounty of her travels permeates each room, breathing life into its bones. A cachet of hand-knotted rugs and vintage textiles swathe chairs, beds and sofas in lieu of branded, upholstered ones, evoking a sense of origin. “Established furniture that has texture is like having old trees; it brings instant stories and gravitas,” she notes. To further comfort and embrace, she has teamed oak floors with rietdak (reed) ceilings and poplar beams and wrapped the walls and ceiling of her living room in a custom paint by color designer Freya Lincoln. The hue – a mottled, sun-baked clay – was glazed for added depth.
Like thrusting open an exotic chest, layers of texture and time-worn color mingle to intoxicating effect. What Savigné acquires, she collects from the heart, a sentiment conveyed in her impressive contemporary African art collection whose stars include the likes of Cameron Platter, Athi-Patra Ruga, Zanele Muholi and Kudzanai Chiurai.
Come summertime in South Africa, the European friends whose stylish homes Savigné has holidayed in head south with the sun to her home. Throwing open the doors to host friends and family, gathering with them at the fire or at the intimate bar in her lounge …
This is her home’s natural purpose. “It’s a home that says, ‘Fill me up,’ ”she muses. And full it is. Two months after she moved in, she welcomed 300 guests for the Interjoin CC Cape Town Art Fair afterparty.
Photography by Karl Rogers.
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