A boyhood longing of artist and academic Keith Dietrich to design and build his own home gradually took shape as he transformed a ramshackle Victorian house into a dwelling place of dreams. MARLENE VAN NIEKERK traces the process.
The meaning of dwelling
The main function of a house is to offer appropriate spaces for dreaming, wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space. Houses indeed hold our dreams, but dreams also treasure our houses, like the home one has grown up in, or the house that one longs to own one day. This is a story of one such house and its dreamer – by extension also its builder and its thinker.
When, in the year 2001, Keith Dietrich moved from Johannesburg to Stellenbosch to join the university’s Visual Arts Department, he was finally able to realise a dream he had nurtured since he was in standard nine – to design and build his own house. He did not particularly like the stark face-brick house he grew up in, one of many such urban houses built in South Africa after World War II for ex-combatants like his father.
During his student years in Stellenbosch in the late seventies Keith had his lodgings consecutively in three stately Victorian houses around the intersection of Van Riebeeck Street and Die Laan. He fell in love with the innate “architectural drama” offered by the asymmetrical facades featuring various window and door styles, different roof sizes with steep pitches, dormers and towers. They produced a strong counter-image to South African urban residential building style with its minimalist modernist aesthetic, monochromatic colour schemes and clean lines, producing, according to Keith, “drawing board designs rather than homes to live in”.
In the winter of 2001, looking for a property to buy, Keith stumbled upon an old house in downtown Stellenbosch and knew straight away this would be his dream house.
Built in 1901 by the first stationmaster of Stellenbosch, Joseph Oseland Rex, the house in Herold Street, at the bottom of Dorp Street, however, confronted its new owners with the kind of ‘renovator’s dream’ that most would consider a nightmare.
Alterations and additions by the previous owner had been exclusively done with a view to renting out a large portion of the house to students – boarders who, judged by the state of some of the rooms, could not have cared less. Its sizable garden was an overgrown jungle that had served as a dumping ground for rubbish and building rubble.
Over a period of 23 years, alongside his academic and artistic careers, Keith slowly and with the help of at most two assistants at a time restored the house to a glory it had never known. In doing so, he and all who watched in amazement, realised that the dream required the essential meaning of ‘dwelling’ to be performed: building, adjusting, arranging, equipping, furnishing, decorating and securing one’s abode.
Often during this time when I saw Keith reaching up on a ladder, crouching underneath a flight of stairs, bending over pipes, wires, boards and tiles, measuring, fitting, turning, planing, welding, painting, moulding hammering, his clothes covered in dust and spattered with paint, his hands marked by cuts, stains and bruises,
I remembered Jean Michelet’s observation of birds’ nestbuilding referred to by Bachelard.
Having assembled the materials for the base, the bird would start circling and trampling, pressing its breast again and again up against the inner sides of the nest, imparting its passion to as yet unyielding matter.
Its chest would be bruised, its claws weathered by the effort to compress the twigs, leaves, mosses or mud and finally the tufts of down, hair or spider silk until the nest held together as a firm cup of snug brooding felt. It would be slept in, surveyed, dwelt on and tirelessly adjusted every morning to ensure that it was just right for when the eggs needed to be laid.
The process of building
In the first year the interior of the house, partitioned into a number of pokey rooms, was opened up to accommodate, in the southern flank, a farmhouse-style kitchen with big central table and open hearth plus a spacious bathroom.
In 2003, according to the renovator’s logbook, “the walls running off the lounge and kitchen to the back stoep were fitted with two large custom-made doors that repeated the dimensions of the tall windows opening onto the stoep. The roof of the three-metre-wide veranda was constructed with custom-curved corrugated iron sheets that echoed the ones in the front”.
The three tall palm trees in the backyard, understood from the beginning as the guardian spires of the property, were retained to become the focal point. The garden was then divided into three rectangles, each with its own personality and allure.
In 2007 a staircase was set in place and the attic repurposed as a studio with bookshelves, storage and office space for the artist and his wife, Linde, an editor and translator.
On the western side, an extra guest bedroom with an en-suite bathroom and toilet was portioned off, while at the back, facing north, a dormer with three large sash windows offering a garden view was added.
By 2022 the three-roomed flat on the western flank of the house was renovated and the front garden relandscaped with fynbos bordered by a paved rectangle.
The art of earthly abiding – a diligently carved-out legacy
Now, in the year 2024, the process of having the rooms and passages painted in rich ochres, smoky greens and royal blues accented by white picture railings, seems like a homemaker’s final flourish.
A veritable rainbow has taken hold of the light streaming in through the tall windows. Photographs of ancestors and coveted souvenirs from previous stages of life are exhibited along the staircase and have, through the fresh and vibrant colours, gained a heightened radiance of commemoration.
The sustained effort of building, dwelling and thinking, has harmonised exterior and interior so that the house is couched in an aura of humble pride. Space has been articulated into a place, into a living archive of experiences and cultivated interests, into a compass gathering the existential fourfold which Heidegger named as one of earth, sky, god and mortals. A meaningful location was established, resonating with the other Victorian buildings in the street, with the frogs from the Eerste River frequenting the pond and the pied kingfisher diving into the water from his perch in the syringa tree.
When one stops in Herold Street to visit the folks at number 16, the high-roofed green-and-beige house,
with the scalloped white plaster trim framing its tall, shuttered windows, never fails to remind one of a grand old ship riding there within her delicate moorings of Victorian palisade.
Having come a long way together, one shares the joy of the Dietrich grandparents welcoming their first grandchild into this magic home.
Thirteen thousand kilometres away, in the Northern Hemisphere, one receives, of a morning, a video clip where Louis Dietrich, only five months old, is held tenderly aloft in well-worn hands, and then lowered over the front yard fountain, the water rising and tumbling through his tiny, grasping fingers.