Rusted sheets of corrugated iron, retro red brick, steel and cement floors set off fashionable fine works of art. Salvaged from demolished structures on site, as well as from rubbish dumps elsewhere, these recycled materials are shaped into funky patterns of living and leisure space.
Ricci Polack’s The Refinery, situated near the old gasworks in Milpark, is a loft-style residential complex. Around the corner is Brian Green’s shopping-cum-leisure centre at 44 Stanley Avenue.
Both have become trendy addresses, attracting creative people who work in the neighbourhood: from film, advertising and home-products designers to artists and media people from the Mail & Guardian, the SABC, Media24, and academics from Wits and RAU universities.
The area, known in the 1940s and 1950s as the ‘north western light industrial area”, is still marked on maps as Braamfontein Werf. In the early days people were attracted to the area by the aroma of freshly baked bread from bakeries and by the local button factory. Nowadays it is called Milpark and is tucked behind the Milpark Holiday Inn.
Covering about 7ha, the area forms an important link in the chain of renewal that is rising from downtown Johannesburg. It stretches via Constitutional Hill in Hillbrow to the north-western residential suburbs – Auckland Park, Melville and further on. It was this ‘midway” location that lured developers back to Milpark after it had fallen into disuse, partly because the Emmarentia fly-over had directed traffic away from the area.
Creative minds spotted the potential of both the location and the sturdy building structures. Architect Jonathan Gimpol resurrected the Mail & Guardian offices from the derelict building that used to house The Blue Ribbon bakery. Next he metamorphosed the dilapidated Atlas Bakery into film studios for Anant Singh and Franz Marx.
Ricci Polack put his hammer to walls in Chubb Security’s buildings – formerly a button factory – to create his double-volume loft units. He named them The Refinery to fit in with The Media Mill around the corner.
Brian Green and his artist brother-in-law, Grant Baily, found a spot for the restaurant-bar called The Color Bar in a complex of rotting buildings. The resurrected precinct, now called 44 Stanley Avenue, has struck the right chord. Clients drive across Jo’burg’s leafy north to enjoy the industrial chic of 44 Stanley Avenue. Besides The Color Bar, the precinct houses an art gallery, a paint shop, a mosaic workshop, gift and clothing shops and several restaurants.
Apartments at The Refinery sold out within three weeks of the launch, at between R300 000 and R1,2-million for 110m2 to 350m2. The 12 inhabitants already living there will soon be joined by other residents as the 46 units are completed. Polack, artist Paul Emmanuel and musician Greg Dale are some of the current inhabitants.
The Refinery embraces the ideals of sustainable building practice. ‘Just about everything we chop out is re-used in some or other way. We recycle scrap material from gutted buildings on the site and elsewhere. And we purchase from scrapyards all over,” explains Russell Thomas, the interior designer. He and architect Jorge Rodriques are resuscitating old metal doors, stripping down parquet flooring and turning an old metal fridge into a post box, for example.
Polack says after he returned to Johannesburg from Cape Town in 1996 he started searching ‘for buildings with character and history”. The Fifties style attracted him to Braamfontein Werf.
He has re-created the kind of loft apartments from spacious warehouse buildings that were a feature of the refurbishment of New York’s Tribeca district. As if to prove his point that this was the right way to go, he is already planning his next development in the inner city.
My first impression when I visited the loft apartments of The Refinery recently was a pleasant syn-aesthetic experience of unrestricted space. Though the apartments are double volume from floor to mezzanine via a staircase, I didn’t feel dwarfed because of cleverly placed functional pieces such as a built-in fireplace, kitchen-dining-service block, staircase, or suspended television cupboards.
Contrasting colours and floor and wall textures emphasise warmth and human presence. A mix of worn wood, rusted metal salvaged from gutted parts of the building and slick hi-tech appliances plays with the senses.
You can’t help but notice the clever ways in which costs have been cut. Who would have thought to suspend a roughly hammered-together furniture-removal crate from the high ceiling to house a television set? Ingenious: it serves to define the airy space around it; it’s cheap, functional and a spark for conversaton. Besides making you smile.
Bedrooms are fitted with no-fuss storage space, in a shiny metal oval structure that juts out over a combined kitchen, dining and living area below. They are practical, low cost and provide privacy and beauty, without heavy, labour-costing dividing walls.
A fire escape-type staircase with thin, steel cables connects bottom floor and loft bedroom upstairs. The ‘passage” between the bedroom and work station on the mezzanine level is a suspended steel bridge. These are functional and cost-saving devices that do not compromise the aesthetic appeal of the interior as a whole.
There’s something definitely upbeat about the contrast between the minimalist surfaces of biscuit-coloured walls and the steelwork in sober grey. The whole is offset against bold statements of red and orange in sliding doors and wall panels. No showy tiles or new wood cover the screeded cement floors and built-in concrete seating against the wall.
Dale, the musician, was getting ready for a practice session in his music studio-cum-dining room. He pointed to the solid laminated wood and metal kitchen counter: ‘We designed and made it from scrap pieces at a fraction of the price of something similar. Instead of R5 000, we got away with around R1 000,” he said.
A feeling of security among the residents is enhanced by built-in communal areas. All the apartments share a view of the central garden, punctuated with bold sculptural statements. Even these sculptures originated from rusted, discarded building materials.
There is a lap pool of 17m for those residents who want to exercise while they swim. There is also a 15m-high climbing wall. For those who are more into decadence, there is a martini pool, and an outside bar and braai area.
Pollack, inclined to a touch of class, has introduced another concept of luxury for his lifestyle concept. It comes in the form of an indoor Japanese-inspired breakfast braai – the Teppenyaki flat grill. This is where mostly the singles languish around a communal cooking operation.
They mean it, these developers and designers, when they say ‘everyone participates. Sharing ideas and being part of the bigger whole is what The Refinery is all about,” say Pollack and Thomas. Sustainability in building homes has as much to do with relationships between people as it has with the relationship between building materials and with the site.
Cost-saving, too, is one of the major aspects in environmentally conscious building operations. Especially since it is so closely related to re-using and recycling.
‘We create all our own stains, make concrete steelwork flooring, design our own windows and fill them with glass from discarded others,” says Thomas.
All the natural structural elements of building are on show, eliminating the need for covering up structural devices such as roof-bearing beams with conventional cardboard. ‘We don’t chase conduit piping into walls. That also had an effect on the total savings.
‘In our first phase of The Refinery development our building costs came in at under R2 000 per square metre. And we provided quality finishes – top-quality materials, aside from the re-used ones,” says Thomas.
Savings were also effected via the novel method of selling only the core of an apartment. This allows the owner to develop the interior over time. Costs and developments in the design are staggered.
‘We designed the interior around the tastes, needs and budget of the client,” explains Thomas. Each apartment has its own individual character, though ‘we retained an overall unity in keeping with the former industrial character of the original buildings”, says Thomas.
As many of the residents work in the area, time-consuming and costly transport between living, working and leisure destinations has been eliminated. This was a key issue in deciding on Braamfontein Werf for re-development – the ability to walk, instead of drive, is an added ‘green” attraction.
Judging from the energy and optimism at both 44 Stanley Avenue and The Refinery, it would seem the visionaries who took the plunge and invested in this once-filth infested corner of industrial city are reaping rewards.
Polack sums up the key to their success: ‘Our goal is to develop properties, not to make a fast buck. We want to demonstrate that people in Johannesburg are sitting with hundreds of empty buildings, structures that can be utilised at a fraction of the cost of building new ones. That we can build properly, but at affordable prices. And that people can live in them.”