D
esigner Anna Trzebinski’s house outside Nairobi takes its cue from nature. From the drive it is invisible, concealed in a grove of indigenous olive and croton trees. Its structure incorporates locally felled tree trunks – they make handsome, gnarled columns on the verandas. Visually as well as physically, it is part of the African bush. Anna designed the house with her late husband, Tonio, an artist. At the centre of a 250-acre forest reserve in Langata, it was built 14 years ago by Tonio and a team of Kikuyu builders. ‘Once we found the plot, we camped here to learn the lie of the land. The trees determined the size of the house,’ says Anna. ‘Tonio stopped painting. He built it in eight months.
The men who helped him are still here, operating the woodwork shop he started.’ Tonio died in 2001, and Anna closed the furnituredesign business for a year, before reopening it in 2003. The ground floor of the house – a single, open-plan living space flooded with light from French windows – provides the perfect introduction. Like all the rooms it has a beamed ceiling and wooden floor (olivewood in this case; upstairs floors are mahogany or cedar wood). The walls are simply furnished with a plaster that contains coloured pigment and lime, a traditional Swahili method called niru. ‘The treatment is influenced by the stucco technique used for centuries in Damascus, Venice, Oman and India,’ Anna explains. ‘It changes colour according to the humidity in the air, and the absorption and evaporation of moisture helps to keep the rooms cool.’ Here the walls have been finished in shades of taupe – a neutral foil for a pair of striking buffalo paintings by Tonio. ‘They
LEFT: A pair of colourful beaded African chairs in front of a painting of a buffalo by Tonio Trzebinski ABOVE: Jewellery designer Anna Trzebinski and her bull terrier on a sofa on the terrace of her Kenyan home Bridge for Design March 2015
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