Tag Archives: neil stemmet

Simply Pierre Cronje

Last year Neil Stemmet approached me to landscape famed carpenter, Pierre Cronje’s showroom in Wolfe Street, Chelsea Village.

Neil and I share similar views on collaborative creativity and on lifestyle and decor trends. One specific trend is going back to our roots, calling for simpler times and reinvesting ourselves into our homes and kitchens, quite literally bringing the outdoors, indoors.

I had a blank slate to work with and rather than turning the garden into a ‘farm’ I tried to work into the established landscape, we kept the indigenous trees, removed the aliens and then planted around them.

I wanted to share that growing vegetables could be done anywhere and worked into ones existing landscape, lettuces between your shrubs, grandillas along the fence line, tomatoes between the agapanthus etc.

The only gratuitous liberty I took was growing climbing beans and cucumbers up the indigenous acacias trees, which were literally brimming with edible gifts, a sort of summery Christmas tree.

I pulled out the perennial basil lining the window boxes and planted up 20+ varieties of vegetables and herbs, providing an edible feast to both clients and staff alike.

Over the course of 3 months I would do weekly pruning and place the harvest inside the showroom for clients to help themselves to.

All this culminated on Thursday night with the official launch event with Jacques Erasmus from Hemelhuijs cooking up a storm with ingredients I had picked from the garden early in the day with all the decor and styling under Neil’s careful curating.

I was delighted to see that Pierre also picked up a Design Indaba award for his Simply Pierre range, the day before I delivered a Petcha Kutcha talk there on, you guest it, collaborative creativity.



Tangible Objectives

I’ve never liked resolutions, I prefer goals, tangible objectives achieved through measurable actions.

As an outward expression of this I launched the #curatethisspace initiative, the idea was simple, to open up our home to fellow creatives to express ideas, thoughts and philosophy over a great food and conversation, served by masterchef Neill Anthony, documenting it along the way.

The canvas was our Cado royal system wall unit, used as a mini gallery with each creative given a budget of R600 (under $100USD) to use towards decorating there shelf.

The participants were fellow creatives in different fields: Industrial Design (Lucas R Adams of Kraftisan), Interior Design (Neil Stemmet of Koncept Design Architecture and Interiors), Stylists (The Wild Creative of Thaya Bedford & Nicole Ravenscroft) and Illustration (Lauren Fowler), amazingly with no prior correspondence the team came up with designs that flowed seamlessly into each other as if almost inextricably linked.

You can read further thoughts and insights here:

Visi – Curate this Space
Design Indaba – Locally Curated
House & Leisure – People to watch in 2012

Excited by combining these elements into the singular creative event it led me to turning the concept into a new blog, curating life and documenting decor and lifestyle trends.