HIGH FLYER
High up on Cape Town’s gorgeous Nettleton Ridge, hugging the craggy Cape mountainside and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, is a vision that might make you think for a moment that you’d entered a parallel universe. You could be looking at Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion from the Iron Man franchise, or a Bond villain’s lair, or even something out of The Jetsons.
You wouldn’t be far off-this Clifton house, belonging to mining banker Lloyd Pengilly and designed with crucial input from his son Hanno-has its roots in the same US westcoast architecture that inspired all of these cinematic fantasies, particularly the work of John Lautner.
Perhaps the most famous of Lautner’s designs is the Elrod House in Palm Springs, which appeared in James Bond’s Another, the Sheats Goldstein House, pops up in i. They’re LA party pads, rising organically from their rocky mountainsides, their interiors fusing with their vast views: part stone sculpture,
