Light Touch

It takes a good eye to spot potential in a fixer-upper, particularly in a city like Johannesburg. There are some real gems – almost always undervalued – but their qualities are often lost beneath the add-ons that barnacle their way onto houses over time.

... Christo is a former textile designer turned builder/renovator – with a side-line in manufacturing bespoke features, especially metalwork and ironmongery – and Nico is an urban designer with a keen interest in the city’s architectural history. Together, they make a formidable team: insightful and capable, with the perfect combination of vision and respect for the innate qualities of a good find ...

They recognized that they were looking at something special when they walked into this early 1940s double-story house in the suburb of Greenside. The perfection of the sensuously curved, Artdeco inflected balustrade on the stairs was the first clue that highly skilled builders had been at work ...

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