GIfA Regional Awards Entry 2025
Project: Garden Pavilion In Westcliff, Johannesburg
Architect: @bdstudioarchitects
Photographers: Annalize Nel, Siyabonga Kubheka, Bryan Dunstan
Perched atop Westcliff Ridge, this project transforms a 1920s residence by replacing a poorly conceived 1960s arcade with a new Garden Pavilion that harmonizes architecture and landscape. Conceived as a timeless structure, it evokes ancient ruins overtaken by nature, featuring lotus-inspired columns, textured off-shutter concrete, and poetic lighting details. The design enhances spatial proportion, integrates a fire-pit between the terrace and pool, and connects the roof garden seamlessly with the valley canopy. Through crafted concrete surfaces and thoughtful massing, the pavilion restores balance, intimacy, and enduring beauty to this majestic hillside home.
GIfA Regional Awards Entry 2025
Project: Jaali Owl House
Architect: @bdstudioarchitects
Photographers: Siyabonga Kubheka & Annalize Nel
The Jaali Owl House in Parkhurst is a thoughtfully designed compact family home that draws its name from two distinctive features; a delicate Jaali screen on the south façade and a pair of circular openings on the north façade that resemble the eyes of an owl. Anchored by a double-storey core and surrounded by single-storey elements, the home creates two carefully crafted courtyards: a private rear sanctuary raised with reclaimed rubble to blend indoor and outdoor spaces, and a public front courtyard marked by a stinkwood tree and a welcoming canopy. The house is rich in memory and material reuse, featuring off-shutter concrete ceilings, parquet floors and bricks salvaged from the original home, and a sculptural rain spout shaped like an owl’s beak — a tribute to a builder’s past connection with architect Pancho Guedes. At night, the Jaali glows softly, offering glimpses in and out, while inside, a double-volume space offers “owl-eye” views toward Hamilton Park. This home is a layered, living structure; expressive, grounded, and deeply connected to place.
Just as the contours steadily rise from the street, so the program of the home climbs to where the floor of the Main Bedroom meets a corresponding contour at the back of the site.
It feels like the qualities and constraints of a compromised site have been harnessed to express a form and create a pattern of living that can only happen here.
The street entry carves out an arrival court that contrasts the shape of organic contours with the rigid geometry of expressive concrete brutalism.
A private bedroom wing suspended above the ground floor squeezes out the last minutes of warmth from a sunny day on a southern slope, and provides cover for the outdoors where there can be shade in summer and the most sun in winter.
One for the Paulistas! The shape of an unconventional subdivision on a short picturesque road descending perpendicular to the contours on the south side of the Westcliff ridge paints the picture of a phenomenal site with challenging constraints that finds its true expression in concrete brutalism.
The L-shaped plan locates the main living areas at the widest portion of the site, overlooking the street through an expansive brise-soleil detailed with perforated concrete blocks that take a punishing western orientation and negotiate the interface between private home and public street.
