“YOU KNOW, I COUNTED EVERY SINGLE BRICK IN THIS HOUSE,” says architect Adèle Naudé Santos, smiling, as she stands looking around the main bedroom of the first house she ever designed — a solid Modernist four-bedroomer completed in 1967 and situated in a narrow, leafy avenue in Cape Town's Kenilworth.
She may not actually be joking. Their modular layout, visible through the unplastered whitewashed walls, conceivably measure the dimensions of the house brick by brick. US-based Adèle may now be a world-renowned architect, but back then she was just starting her career, and this was her first-ever build. And as if the stakes weren't high enough, the client was her father, the late architect Hugo Naudé.
