Cape Dutch Architecture - Cape Dutch Gables

Cape Dutch Gables

The Western Cape is home to one of the most distinctive styles of 'settler' architecture in the world. It is known as the 'Cape Dutch' style, because it developed during the century and a half that the Cape was a Dutch colony. Even at the end of that period, at the beginning of the 19th century, the colony was inhabited by fewer than fifty thousand people, mostly of white and brown complexion. This number was spread over an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom. Yet despite their small number, over such a vast area, the Cape Dutch style was of an amazing consistency, clearly related to rural architecture in northwestern Europe, but equally clearly with its own unmistakable character and features.

The old farm complex of Spier shows all of these features to perfection. It consists of a main homestead with, surrounding a forecourt in front of it, its auxiliary buildings: a jonkershuis (a second dwelling, intended for the farmer's eldest son), stables, wine 'cellars', workers' quarters. What strikes one first of all is the overall uniformity of all these buildings: the relationship between wall and roof, the materials of which they are built: plastered and limewashed soft brick, and their dimensions: all of them almost exactly six metres in roof span.

It is this last feature: the high degree of standardization, that is the main characteristic of 'Cape Dutch' architecture, and the one that sets it apart from similar types of architecture elsewhere. The strict uniformity of roof span also dictated the ground plan of what was usually the most commodious of all the buildings on a farmyard: its homestead. In order to accommodate an adequate number of rooms, the building had to develop wings to the back – all with the same roof height and the same six-metres roof span. This produced what has come to be known as the 'letter-of-the-alphabet' plan. A 'T' shape was the simplest: a wing springing from the centre and containing a large central room and a kitchen behind. But when this did not yet provide enough space, the 'H'-shape was developed, with an entire section at the back parallel to the front section. This shape is not found anywhere else on earth. The homestead of Spier is an interesting case of an incomplete H: one in which the T has not quite grown into an H – a 'small letter h' in fact.

If the 'letter-of'the-alphabet' plan is the feature that gives local colonial architecture is uniqueness, to the casual observer it is something else that grabs the attention: the Cape Dutch gable. But gables are far from unique at the Cape. They are found all over Europe, especially in the cities of the Low Countries. A gable is basically a piece of wall that rises above the end of a pitched roof. (The word derives from the old Dutch word 'gaffel', a forked pole that served to hold up a roof-ridge beam in primitive architecture.) In Holland and elsewhere in Europe nearly all gables are therefore placed at the end of a house, often in rows where the houses stand end-on to the street as in a city like Amsterdam. At the Cape, we see gables used in a different way. That is because in our wide-open country, also in the towns, the houses invariably stand sideways, with open arms, as it were, welcoming visitors. So if a gable was needed to give the house a 'face', it had to go in the middle of the facade, over the front door. So at the Cape the finest gables are 'centre gables'. Technically they are not gables at all, because they do not terminate a roof but only a built-out section of it – full-height flush dormer windows they could be called. With their sloping parapets gables lend themselves excellently to receive decorative outlines and enrichments. Among the local plasterers abundant talent was found to turn some of these into true masterpieces. Many of them must have been people of colour, some of them slaves. But in their shapes and motifs they faithfully followed the European style periods: 'baroque' with its increasingly ornate curves up to about 1790, then 'neo-classical' shapes with more straight lines, pilasters and pediments.

But the centre gables are not the only gables on Cape Dutch farmyards. Thatch roofs also need proper roof-end gables, to prevent the strong prevailing winds from ripping up the thatch at the ends. These were often simplified versions of the centre gables. With their neat white bits of sloping walling they provide a pleasing containment to all Cape Dutch structures.