It’s said that change is as good as a holiday. This might be less true when it entails leaving England for South Africa with a young family in tow to make a fresh start in the Free State village of Clarens. It’s the situation in which Tansy and Wilbert van den Dolder found themselves several years ago. Having built a new home from scratch, it wasn’t too long before they purchased another Clarens property with the intention of renovating it and renting it out as a guesthouse.
It may have been the final resting place of face brick and knotty pine, but the Van den Dolders saw straight through the original building’s ubiquitous orange veneer and recognised its potential. ‘It was badly planned, but was one of a handful in town with a view and we decided we could easily work on the structure,’ recalls Wil, who owns a kitchen design company in Knysna, a little over 1 000km away (and where sons Jonathan, 13, Emil, six, and Alfie, four, go to school), called Willow’s Kitchens. With an overall move to update, open up and brighten the building, the result could almost be an entirely different property. ‘We took the classic British manor house feel and brought it here to Clarens,’ says Tansy. Even the backdrop – lush green fields with willow trees and poplars that pepper the landscape – could be passed off for the English countryside.
Yet beyond it, a distinctly African picture is painted, with a southerly view that surveys Lesotho’s vast Maluti Mountains and Mount Horeb, which peers out over the small village. That the couple did it in three months (just in time for their first Christmas bookings) and managed the project nearly all themselves – barring the help of a small building team – is no small feat. ‘We love renovating and the quotes we got were exorbitant,’ explains Tansy. She recalls the first time they viewed the original house: ‘It had a 1970s, dark and dusty feel to it with a tiny fenced-in garden and a dim kitchen; but it was a big, open-plan house,’ she says, adding with a smile that corridors ‘aren’t our thing’.
