Stuurmansfontein: a corbelled house in the Karoo

By Roxanne Reid
The sun had set and we were sipping wine and eating farm bread by candlelight at Stuurmansfontein near Carnarvon – a corbelled house in the Karoo, now an unusual guesthouse. It felt as if we’d fallen through a wormhole into the past.

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There was old wooden furniture, satin-finished and honey-coloured with the patina of long years. There were deep windowsills confirming the thickness and cooling capacity of the stone walls. In the kitchen, a Dover stove (with a gas hotplate for modern convenience nearby). In the yard, a small asbosskerm to protect you from the wind as you sit around the braai.

Staying overnight at Stuurmansfontein is like falling down a wormhole into the past

Corbelled houses ooze Karoo practicality. They were built by trekboers in the area of Williston, Carnarvon and Fraserburg between 1830 and 1880 – the northwest Karoo’s first architectural style. It’s thought the idea of these beehive-shaped structures came originally from the southern Mediterranean, and they certainly made sense around here because trees for posts and beams weren’t exactly thick on the ground. Stones, of course, were lying around everywhere in the veld.

With these stones neatly stacked in a circle of diminishing diameter, and plaster made of wheat chaff, sand and water, the trekboer builders achieved structures that are still standing some 150 years later.

Stuurmansfontein - the corbelled structure on the left is now the living room, the one on the right the main bedroom

As the roofs grew, the builders left stones jutting out as scaffolding so they could climb up to build higher, and for maintenance. They must have been pretty fit, those 19th century trekboers, because these ‘steps’ are quite far apart, needing a heck of a supple stretch to get from one to another.

The Stuurmansfontein guesthouse has two corbelled structures next to each other, each with a door and window. One now houses the living room and the other the main bedroom, complete with brass bedstead. In the old days, if your family grew you just plonked down another corbel and carried on. Once you’d really made it financially, you might even build a rectangular gabled structure, like the one that now houses Stuurmansfontein’s voorkamer and kitchen.

I love history and tradition and old buildings, but one modern thing I like is a bathroom. And Stuurmansfontein had one – even if we had to walk outside to get to it.

The voorkamer takes up most of the gabled addition, together with the kitchen and second bedroom

The people of Stuurmansfontein
If you have a picture in your head of a typical farmer’s wife, then Charmaine Botha isn’t it. She was working in the garden of the main house when we arrived. Petite and sylph-like, her face pale and pretty under a big sunhat, she wouldn’t have looked out of place sipping espresso at a pavement café in Paris. Her husband Piet – the third generation of Bothas on the farm – restored the corbelled house in the early 1990s.

The main bedroom, showing the beginnings of the corbelled roof

She told us that a man called Fanie Bergh was a bywoner on the farm until the 1960s. His daughter, Aunt Stien, grew up at Stuurmansfontein and is now in her nineties.

‘She came to visit the house a few years ago and told me her mother was known for the best coffee in the area,’ said Charmaine. ‘Her secret ingredient was dried figs mixed in with the coffee beans.’

The Berghs were totally self-sufficient. They had no refrigerator, so they’d rub a sheep’s carcass with coarse salt and flour, cover it with a cloth and store it under the bed. That was the coolest place during the day. At night they’d hang it outside.

Window details show Stuurmansfontein's sense of style

‘They stored their quinces, pomegranate and grapes wrapped in straw in the attic, and in winter the grapes were still grapes and not raisins,’ she added, hinting at the coldness of the Carnarvon winters here in the Karoo.

Most of the furniture in the house has a story. ‘The desk in the voorhuis belonged to Aunt Stien’s father, and I framed a few of her hartsgoed over there by the front door,’ said Charmaine.

Aunt Stien's hartsgoed (top left), the kitchen (bottom left) and details from the main bedroom, including the intrepid travelling bears who have accompanied us on our travels for more than a decade

Although it was Piet’s idea to turn the corbelled house into a guesthouse, it’s Charmaine’s panache that made our home for the night so special: farm bread in a brown-paper bag with a sprig of greenery tied to the top with string, fresh flowers in jugs around the house, at least a dozen candles all over the house for light and a touch of old-fashioned romance. It felt as though garish contraptions like TVs and ipods hadn’t been invented yet.

Charmaine brought us freshly baked farm bread

Instead, we enjoyed the lingering pink of sunset, the star-scattered Karoo sky, the silence. Charmaine told us some visitors have seen the resident ghost, and I was disappointed it didn’t make an appearance; I’d have loved to chat about die ou dae.

A film crew was due to arrive on the farm a few days after we left, there to shoot an ad for Karoo Lamb of Origin. If you see that ad one day and fall under the spell of Stuurmansfontein, I’ll understand.

I know we did.

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