KOMMETJIE HOUSE
NESTLED ATOP A DUNE in Kommetjie, the family home that architect and ceramicist Emma Day shares with her businessman husband, Chris, and their two teenage children is a triumph of intuitive design. It’s the realisation of a long-held dream for the couple, who had wanted to give their children the kind of coastal lifestyle they’d had growing up. “I grew up in Ramsgate on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, while Chris grew up in, an architectural treatise proposing that the world’s most beautiful spaces were not made by architects but by, and for, people. Alexander’s approach is not top-down design or bottom-up chaos, but generative constraints that begin with the environment and run through a “grammar” of building — which means the design emerges from these constraints in much the same way that a sentence arises from grammatical rules.
