LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Building with the mountain
Gareth Griffiths Grant Pitcher / Carte Collection
Three Northern Drakensberg properties show how far landscape architecture can take its cues from the land, using local materials, restrained forms, and infrastructure designed around the mountain environment.
There is a common assumption in modern hospitality development that the land exists to be reshaped around a building rather twhan the other way round.
Lodges located in the Northern Drakensberg, The Cavern, Montusi Mountain Lodge, and Sungubala Eco Camp, are all part of the Carte Collection( www. carte-collection. co. za), and follow the opposite approach. Their architecture is shaped by restraint, material honesty, and a close reading of the surrounding landscape.
Letting the land lead
The collection’ s origins date to 1941, when the earliest buildings at The Cavern were raised from sandstone quarried from the surrounding hills and roofed with thatch cut on the property. This was not initially an aesthetic decision, but a practical response to the property’ s isolation and available resources. Over time, however, it resulted in a clear architectural language.
The buildings appear to grow out of the hillside rather than sit on top of it. Walls follow the contours instead of cutting across them, while low rooflines allow the mountain to remain the dominant presence.
Bill Carte articulated the philosophy behind the approach in 1941:“ Our work is to create beauty, to make the land more fertile, to make our living, to leave the world better than when we first came into it.”
That principle continues to guide the development of each property in the Carte Collection.
“ The intention was never to impose something onto the land,” says Megan Bedingham, owner of The Cavern.“ It was always to work with what was already here, using what the environment provided and allowing the buildings to sit within it. That thinking still guides every decision we make.”
As the collection expanded to include Montusi Mountain Lodge and Sungubala Eco Camp, the same vocabulary of stone, timber, and thatch was retained. This does not mean that the properties simply repeat one another. Each responds to its particular setting, but all share a reluctance to introduce materials, forms, and scales that compete with the surrounding terrain.
The result is a property portfolio that reads less as a series of separate accommodations and more as a continuous interpretation of the same terrain, where growth is expressed through consistency rather than reinvention.
“ At Montusi, the architecture was always about restraint,” says Lindsay du Plessis,
90 spring 2026 | www. tobuild. co. za