To enter the front door of Maison Noir one first traverses a wooden boardwalk straddling two ponds filled with koi…and a sense of ease begins to permeate. There is an open-sided verandah in front of you as you step inside, a space which immediately brings to mind the words ‘yoga’ and ‘meditation’. You hang left into the vast, beautiful living area, dominated by a high-pitched roof which looks out over the pool to the garden and the indigenous fynbos beyond.

The house is, in fact, laid out as a collection of A-frame buildings masquerading as ‘huts’ clustered alongside one another as though they were part of a traditional, rural African village. They’re distinguished by a variety of heights and volumes, staggered footprints and, most of all, by a dark tone of paint that’s not only chic and practical, but that also hints at the mud brick-built homesteads of central Africa. A high wall encircles the ‘village’ – just as the kraal wall, in any part of the continent, would a remote village, designed to keep the cattle in at night and wild animals out. But this is Hout Bay, on the south side of the Cape Peninsula, and we’re only 30 minutes’ from the centre of Cape Town. Think of Maison Noir as a private village where the kraal wall provides privacy and roots the houses in its physical context on an awkward slope way above the Hout Bay Valley.