You love Africa and you love safaris, but do you sometimes feel that lodges are a bit . . . boring? Too much khaki and canvas, yet another animal skin, endless faux-colonial steamer trunks and miles of dark wood?
Not any more. Meet Lesley Carstens and Silvio Rech, leading the charge for a bold breed of lodge designers. Think of any cool new lodge of the past decade and the chances are that this architect/design duo, based in Johannesburg, are the brains behind it. North Island in the Seychelles, Ngorongoro Crater Lodge in Tanzania, Angama Mara in Kenya — all of those and, most recently, King Lewanika in Zambia and Miavana in Madagascar. Each is different, but they have one thing in common — they’ve dumped the “traditional” safari feel in favour of a bright, stylish and authentic look.
Take Miavana. There’s no leather, no khaki and no pith helmets. Instead there’s bone-white sandstone and pale wood. There are also bright pops of colour, cool dip-dyed turquoise fabrics and vast ocean-facing terraces big enough to do cartwheels on.
“There’s definitely been a shift,” Rech tells me. “European and American designers used to look east to Bali to get that ‘zen’ look. Now, though, they’re looking south. New African art, African design — it has all shifted the meridian from east-west to north-south.”
He’s right. Many of the most creative launches of the past year cropped up in Africa — the Nicholas Plewman-designed Bisate Lodge in Rwanda, for example, or Thomas Hetherwick’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.
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“It’s all about working with a local design philosophy,” Rech says. Each project — and they only take on one at a time — has an individual feel that works with its surroundings. They use local labour as well as local, natural building materials and local knowledge.
“When we started we didn’t have a proper construction company, so we went to nearby villages, met with the chief, had a big ndaba [discussion] around the fire and he’d say, ‘That guy is a carpenter, this guy can weave grass, that guy can work with metal.’ We’d cobble together a team of craftsmen and the end product was innovative.”
Spending as much time as possible on site is key. “It really helps if you live on site,” Rech says. They spent two and a half years living on North Island. “We slept in a rubber duck [a dinghy], we had a baby there . . . It’s like method acting — we lived the part every day.”
What’s next? A project with a well-known, minimalist hotel brand and a gorilla lodge in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the root of each is what Rech calls the “genius loci”. Or, as he puts it: “When people go to a place they want to differentiate it from the last place they were at. We’d like people to enter into a different world.”
Three designers to watch
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Caline Williams-Wynn
Modern safari style has had a chic makeover at the hands of Williams-Wynn. Based in Cape Town, her latest achievement is Asilia Africa’s newest lodge, Jabali Ridge in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park. She softened the striking, futuristic stone-and-wood suites with lots of natural, tactile textures — drapey linens in earthy tones, handcrafted wire furniture and wooden louvred windows that fold away to reveal the landscape.
Nicholas Plewman
The South African architect is a dab hand at turning the safari-lodge concept on its head. He’s behind radical designs such as &Beyond’s Sandibe Okavango Safari Lodge, built to resemble a curled-up pangolin, and Wilderness’s Bisate Lodge in Rwanda, which has remarkable squashed beehive-shaped villas that reflect the volcanic surroundings. Next up is Mombo in Botswana, plus a lodge on the lip of a live volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Boyd Ferguson
The creative whizz behind the firm Cécile & Boyd shows no sign of stopping. Another South African designer, Ferguson lends a contemporary feel to traditional lodges. For his latest, Singita Sweni in the Kruger National Park, he worked with GAPP Architects as well as his sister, Geordi de Sousa Costa, who brought in an unexpectedly colourful theme. Neutral polished mud and raw wood are livened up with joyful cobalt rugs, mustard-yellow armchairs, teal sofas and powder-pink cushions.