THE NEST AT SOSSUS A view of this Porky Hefer-designed Namibian nest

The Nest at Sossus

“Do you really need to have something that lasts forever? That’s the conversation of my vernacular architecture,” says South African designer Porky Hefer, best known for his human-sized nests and monstrously wonderful animal cocoons.

His work is playful and dreamlike, and his human bird’s nests have now grown into liveable spaces — manifestations of his fascination with temporality and a somewhat lost, more natural way of being. As well as a couple of magnificently rustic treehouses in the Maldives, based on the manta rays that used to populate the water there, Hefer has recently completed an exquisite private lodge in the Namibian bush, inspired by the nests of the sociable weaverbirds that can be seen hanging in great numbers in nearby Acacia trees. “Everything in the design was obvious,” he says. “It was all right there around us. I didn’t have to explain anything to the owner. I could just point and say ‘look’, so he never had to stretch his imagination to understand.”

Eight years in the making, The Nest at Sossus, situated within the Namib-Naukluft National Park, blends in with its dusty brown surroundings with a thatched roof and rolling outline. Meanwhile inside, carved rooms look out through irregular-shaped windows. “Think about how animals and rural people do it. Everything gets hot and things dry and you get holes, and right then the rain comes, and bright green shoots come up and you use them to fix the holes. The material is supplied at the time that you need it. Sustainable handcraft is like that.”

The structure is a kind of love nest: the ultimate hideaway. Originally the idea was to have no furniture, just built-in shapes that could be used for different purposes with the odd decorative

branch that its imagined avian creator might have found interesting. Of course the requirements of a luxury lodge don’t practically allow for such minimalism, so tasteful fi xtures and fi ttings have become part of the interior landscape. Since completion, the Nest has been awarded the 2019 Wallpaper Design Award for Best Private House.

The ephemeral nature of Hefer’s limitededition architectural pieces is closely linked to what originally inspired his hanging nest furniture — the idea of birth, rebirth and the womb. “The nest is the perfect analogy of a natural birth with security, safety, cocooning,” he says. And indeed his pieces make you feel small, safe and comforted.

“They are like giant masks really,” he adds. “It’s very strange. People are often nervous to get in there until you give them permission, and then their muscles change as they jump in. And then they get all brave. It’s like reversing the womb.” Hefer grew up on a farm surrounded by animals, both wild and domestic, and claims to have crossed many boundaries within the natural world. “We used to have one barn where we kept over 100 ostrich babies at a time,” he recalls. “I’d go in there and because of the warmth of my body, they would think I was their mother and would all jump on me.” It’s memories like this that seeded his ideas for giant, fluffy animal furniture with a strong sense of childlike wonder. After 16 years in the advertising industry, Hefer founded his creative consultancy Animal Farm in 2007. His pieces, from the nests to public installations and artistic furniture, are handmade in South Africa by harnessing skills and materials that are available in the African context.

His own house in Cape Town is filled like a magpie’s nest with objects that he has collected over the years, none of them made by him. “I surround myself with a lot of things that are stimulating. The house is full of opening sentences. Little analogue things that inspire me,” he says. Inspiration, like the odd twig needed to fix a nest, is not something that Hefer worries he will run out of anytime soon. His sketchbooks are full of ideas, collections yet to be made, natural phenomena and shapes he’d like to mimic. “There are so many opportunities. I have so many clever ideas, quickly. You know as the old saying goes, ‘a Boer make a plan’.”