A PIECE OF HERITAGE
For so long I have been infatuated with this house, peeping from between the trees and tall bamboo at the start of Oxford Road. The whimsical, eclectic mansion Dolobran. Years ago, I had taken a rare public tour of the house, which stares defiantly across the freeway at Herbert Baker’s more staid but still grand ‘Northwards’.
Baker, Cecil John Rhodes’s favourite architect, has left his impressive footprint in the city with homes and churches dotted around the suburbs, as well as his own home, Stonehouse, not far from Northwards. Baker’s buildings are scattered around the country too, including the magisterial Union Buildings.
BUILDING IN AFRICA
Like other well-to-do people in Jo’burg in the early 1900s, Llewellyn Andersson asked Baker to design him a house. When Baker presented his Cape Dutch revival design of Dolobran to Andersson, he looked at the design and exclaimed: “This is not the. Andersson didn’t want a shingle roof, he didn’t want small windows, he wanted “light, air and sun”, writes Viney. Andersson described the design as “second-rate” to Northwards, and a “bland effort”.
