SUSTAINABLE BUILDING
Enhancing operational efficiencies
The estate’ s first journey into improving operating efficiency and opening up the wine experience for visitors, while enhancing the cultural identity of the farm, was the wine tasting room. Prior to the modernisation of this offering of the farm, wine tasting took place in the former production and packaging hall, with tasting being conducted on the side. At the same time, a strong feature of the farm, with its established tourist and accommodation offering, was its open spirit, to the obvious appreciation of customers. The architects took that into account.
“ The first major intervention was the creation of the tasting room. It involved reutilising the foundations and remaining structure of an older building on the site, while carefully restoring the historic barrel store built by David Nieuwoudt’ s father, Ernst and his uncle Flippie. Here the response was conceived as a single spatial experience, with visual connections established between old and new. This allowed the lineage of the place, familial, architectural, and productive, to remain legible, anchoring the visitor’ s experience firmly within the farm’ s history,” Dobrovolsky explains.
Former family cottage, now an upgraded accommodation unit.
Architecture-inspired upgrades in the wine production cellar.
It is about harnessing the past in the making of the future.
The production cellar: Due to the special shape of the bricks, the shadow on the wall changes during the course of the day. Done by a local team who hand-cut 120 000 bricks over eight months.
Pieter du Toit conducts a wine tasting. Framed by the pebble feature wall that was built by a skilled local craftsman and portrays the river bed.
One Huisie: Once occupied by the Leipoldt family and one of the oldest buildings on the farm to be adaptively reimagined.
54 autumn 2026 | www. tobuild. co. za
For example, the tasting room, where air recycles from the( cooler) barrel cellar that is visible to wine tasters through a thick glass window, passively cools the venue via grids at the top of the wall. Salvaged cedar wood planks from a nearby farm were fashioned into angled tasting stands in the tasting room. A feature wall at the back room was created using smooth river pebbles, collected by grape pickers on the farm, reflecting the river bed.