Founded in 2010 & led by Jacques Orton, the firm’s work can be found across the globe, with projects ranging from homes, cabins, lodges, places of worship, hotel & restaurant design. “Your home should be a place of inspiration, renewal, connected to nature with a low carbon footprint. I believe that buildings should be easy to upgrade, built to last, and designed so that new features can be added easily.”
Our Architecture is about you, our client, and providing the best possible design solution for your site. For far too long architects have been designing homes as showpieces for architectural magazines without thinking about what it must be like to live in one of them.
Your home, the place where you live, breath & dream has a much bigger impact on your life than what you perceive. Our dream is to create buildings that are environmentally responsive, authentic, artful, tactile and modern.
Homes should respond to flexible needs of parents & children and encourage communal values like work, play, leisure & retirement. “Don’t give me a ‘smart home’, rather give me a well-planned sustainable home with a touch of wilderness.”
Our designs are not based on any particular form or style, but rather open-ended and capable of adapting itself to changing situations. We don’t chase awards & publications- every project should be worthy of an award.
The materials used should be tough, tactile, durable & age well with a low environmental impact. By connecting our buildings to nature and blurring the boundaries between the inside and outside, we aim to promote healthier and happier lives.
Because shelter, food, and water are necessary for our survival, we believe that the planning of a home is more complex than any other design. We are fascinated by what it means to be human; our interactions, traditions & culture.
The correct placement and orientation of a building are of the utmost importance for passive design, with courtyards & patios opening diagonally along the north of the southern edge of the structure. There is always a fine balance between orientation, microclimate, topography, and view.
After an initial site visit, we consider the site from a distance in plan & section, seeing what might be and imagining how the structure can be willed into existence. We spend innumerable hours walking and listening to the land before deciding on the ideal spot to place the building.
Rough sketches- not always pretty and refined, convey something of the development process, and underlying concept that photos of the finished project can’t.
A design concept is then prepared in a broad outline, showing the intended space provisions, planning relationships, materials & functional characteristics of the design. The overall structure is then developed in plan, sections & elevation- incorporating all the services & specifications into a full set of working drawings.
Hekpoort Farm
Magaliesberg,
South Africa
334m2
Jacques Orton
Mariette Gradwell
Frans Goosen
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
