House For Sale in Kalk Bay, Cape Town

From its mountainside backdrop and sweeping sea views, to its detailed features of a bygone antiquity, this lovely old home stands proud on the hill. With its land first surveyed in 1889, the property is described in the Government Gazette of 1986 as a “late Victorian double-storeyed beach house” after it was declared a Grade II Provincial Heritage Site a year earlier.
The ground-floor section is hewn in parts from mountain rock, with large open hearth and stone buttresses. This level’s rooms include a ‘stoep’ and entrance hall, kitchen and bathroom, two enclosed porch-rooms facing the morning sun, and two living rooms with thick beamed ceilings and an original settle still intact. A spiral staircase connects this level to the charming upstairs kitchen.
The upper storey holds the magic: an original exterior staircase, with steps of worn stone, rises to the balcony, affording views across the bay from the legendary Woolley’s tidal pool to Muizenberg and Simons Town. Here, the soft dawn light streams across the ocean into the living room, with its fireplace and ‘French’ doors open to the balcony; while the kitchen and its quirky courtyard glow with the setting sun and back-lit mountain crags. As for the bedrooms, one opens out to the balcony, and another leads off the kitchen courtyard to function as a sunny little studio.
Nothing is sleek or modern here. A rough and rustic driveway leads up to a double garage, past overhanging trees, tall aloes and the red-hot pokers that have filled these gardens for decades. Kalk Bay locals know this as “the Ladan house,” after the artist and sculptor, Eduard Ladan, who lived here for 77 years. He claimed to have drawn his inspiration from the weather-sculpted stone that lies scattered across the property to this day.
The builder of this unique time-capsule created his beach villa for happy holidays at the seaside: he could never have foreseen the trendy, talked-about village that Kalk Bay would become; but “Schoonzicht” still stands, and now awaits its next custodians.