Vygekraal, "The Castle"
From Conde Nast’s 'House and Garden' - January 2003 By Serena Crawford


My life with my eccentric husband has been intricately woven into the extraordinary array of houses we have lived in. I have done the whole gamut from a Johannesburg house with a striking resemblance to a pizza oven, a 13th Century deep freeze in the Cotswolds, followed by a furnished chimney in London, a bedroomless weekender in Palm Beach, a bijoux Colonial Georgian house in Sydney and shortly I’m building a Colonial/African/French Provincial house in Parsley Bay, also in Sydney. Add to this an exhausting array of rented houses and apartments to cover our twenty-four moves. In this ever changing backdrop to our lives, one house – Vygekraal – has remained constant and it is the love of all our lives.

I was as astonished by what I saw as anyone else is who goes to Vygekraal for the first time, especially having just driven through suburban Plettenberg Bay. For there sitting perched on a cliff edge in a sea of fynbos flowers was a crazy stone beach house pretending to be a castle. It was too adorable and funny for words. Like everyone else before or since, I fell in love with it. Six months later we were married on the cliff edge, the beginning of an endless stream of important family celebrations to be held there.

As Queen of the Castle all my dreams of folie de grandeur came true at once, but what I didn’t realize was I was also becoming the Queen of Damp and Appalling Roof Problems. Huge welts of green slime and mushrooms growing on the walls had greeted us when we ventured inside for the first time. Sadly the dramatic vision of the original owner did not include sensible things like cavity walls. Luckily we were young and optimistic as rebuilding and restoring this house has taken us nearly twenty years, partly because we were having too much fun and mostly because that’s how long it takes to get anything done in Plett.

All alterations, decorating and projects have been conducted by fax and phone from the other side of the world. Being a chatelaine by remote control has its drawbacks. I can’t tell you with what anticipation and terror I approach the house to view the latest project after being away for a year. It’s taught me not to be a perfectionist, especially when I saw the swimming pool and some of the upholstery for the first time. One of the children’s bathrooms emerged looking like Polsmoor Prison, an example of misplaced trust in my builder’s taste. The most recent fascination is the beds that hover three meters off the ground. This has added a new excitement to bedtime. Was it my upholsterer’s idea or mine? Who knows or cares when you see it a year later, fait accompli. It’s a real mystery. One I often think about as I pole vault into bed at night.



Nevertheless, we live happily with endless mistakes I have allowed other people to make and the odd curious design elements from the ancien regime that still survive. This includes a subterranean pub/dungeon with fake wine vats plastered over the walls. It has been converted into a lovely place to keep the lilos and boogie boards. Being an offshore chatelaine has other more charming moments. This year I was telephoned in the middle of the night and breathlessly informed by my wonderful cook, Valerie, that a troop of baboons with diarrhea were eating our new and expensive telephone system as we spoke. These sorts of things cheer me up and add a certain je ne sais quoi to my suburban life thousands of miles away.
I decorated the house twenty years ago in the school of "you can have it any colour as long as it’s blue". I hope it has stood the test of time. It’s too bad if it hasn’t, for my children are devoted to the way it looks and scream and cry at even the merest hint of change.

I gave up trying to be original long ago. Any quirky or chic thing I’ve ever done, like draping Balinese cloths over my sofas, was thought of by Anouschka Hempel, Mimi O’Connell and five million other people at the same time. As far as I’m concerned all "original" decorating ideas are in the cosmic consciousness. I’ve lugged, with huge excitement, endless things from all over the world – China, Morocco, Indonesia, Japan, America, England, Italy, Mexico and Australia – only to find them all for sale in a one- horse town on the tip of Africa. How galling is that?
Twenty years of photo collages are threatening to overtake every spare bit of white wall left in the house. But it’s fun and heartbreaking to see the growth of our gorgeous children into teenagers and our rapid spin into middle age every time we walk down the passages. Despite this aberration I have tried to keep things as minimal as possible. I must have succeeded somewhat as John Pawson, the famous English minimalist architect and style Nazi, is a regular houseguest. Only the other day, lying happily in the down cushions on the sofa, looking far too comfortable for a minimalist, he told me if he had his way he’d throw all the furniture over the cliff.

My husband’s contribution to the prevailing atmosphere has been a never-ending collection of huge decorative rocks that he spends all holiday collecting and arranging around the house. Last year our builder cruelly and carelessly used his favorite rock to build the new barbecue. You would have thought it was a Henry Moore the way he carried on when he found out.

My friends have also contributed to the atmosphere; they or my children did all of the paintings and sculpture. The house is also full of the most stunning African cane furniture, designed by my darling and talented friend Inneke Henderson. Stuck on a remote farm, she started this business in order to distract herself during the current revolution in Zimbabwe.

I have achieved the Piet Ouldolf look in my fynbos garden in the most amazing way. By total neglect. God has been left in charge of watering and design. I can’t tell you how satisfying this is; no bills and lots of surprises.

Vygekraal has been the centre of much our happy family’s life. In about August every year we all start getting madly excited about our imminent return…..in December! We and our friends ( who are all recurring guests) have laughed, fallen in love, fought, played good and bad bridge, cooked, eaten wonderful dinners, watched sunsets and sunrises, written special thoughts and danced to loud music for the last twenty years in this crazy house. There are many happy memories in its beautiful thick walls.