The architect Xavier Huyberechts has a wonderfully poetic way of describing how he designed the weekend getaway that he and his brother, Damien, built on their farm south of Johannesburg. He says that he wanted to “gently lift the carpet at the bottom of the hill and slide the house underneath”. And that is exactly what he did. A green roof runs seamlessly from the hillside and over the house, like a blanket of earth. The house is almost invisible from many angles, almost disappearing into the landscape. The way it has been designed and built allows it to, at the end of its life, disintegrate and become reabsorbed into the earth. It’s made almost entirely from the earth—and emphatically for the earth.
The farm Xavier and Damien found after a long search for a spot within an
