On a crowded wall in the engrossing hallway of Cape Town bookseller Henrietta Dax – near a sculptural tableau depicting the stoning of Saint Stephen, and above a clay pot stuffed with wooden walking sticks – is an architectural drawing dating from 1899. It describes the original layout of Dax’s home on a cake-slice wedge of land in Higgovale, a tiny neighbourhood of ruler-straight contemporary homes. The suburb is named after the Higgos, a family of Cornish quarrymen who profited from burrowing into the lower slopes of Table Mountain. Some of the granite they excavated was used to fulfil the wishes of the house’s commissioner, Friedrich Stoltenhoff, a local merchant born to German cloth-dyers in Moscow and who, for two years from 1871, was willingly stranded on a remote South Atlantic island.
Like Stoltenhoff, London-born Dax is an entrepreneurial northern expat, although she arrived in Cape Town in the early 1970s via a land route across Africa. She inherited her bibliophilia from her father, who left behind a library of over 7,000 volumes, and learned the basics of the trade in Paris, at the American College’s book shop. In 1981, Dax started working at the eponymous Long Street store of Anthony Clarke, whose rare-book business she acquired in 1998. It was on Long Street, a central avenue of uneven charms, where Dax encountered two of the earliest occupants of her retrofitted home of 34 years. They appear as young boys in a framed photo that Dax displays above the house plans.
To Capetonians of a certain vintage, Michael and Tim Carney, the two boys in the family photo dated 1934, are figures of legend. Their parents established Palm Bottle Store on Long Street in 1925 to cater for ‘the high class family trade’. By the time Dax encountered them, the brothers had settled into their avuncular and performative roles as the Gilbert & George of the local wine trade. Dax remembers the brothers, good Catholics sworn off alcohol, courteously dispensing tips on Cape wines in immaculately pressed dustcoats. When she invited them to revisit their childhood home, they marvelled at unexpected things. ‘Tim! Look!’ exclaimed Michael at the original light switch in what was once a bedroom, now an open-plan living room.
Dax has remodelled the house twice. The first modification involved knocking down interior walls to create an airy living space between her sea-facing bedroom and country-style kitchen with private garden. She credits artist Geoffrey Bullen-Smith with helping her transform a poky Victorian bungalow into a Karoo-style cottage. Rejuvenating the home also required integrating later add-ons, notably two garages and servant’s quarters. ‘I remodelled the garage and made it into a library and converted the maid’s quarters into a guest bedroom,’ says Dax. ‘The second build involved joining all of this up.’
The sumptuous veranda with granite steps presents as the formal entrance to Dax’s home, but visitors are typically ushered in via a side door. It directly opens from the street on to the library and hallway, which doubles as a study. The hallway is a jewel box of strange delights. The long-legged egret entombed in a glass cabinet was acquired at the liquidation auction of Prynnsberg Manor, a storied sandstone mansion built in the 1880s for a diamond magnate in Clocolan, near the Lesotho border. Dax condenses the stately home’s tale of gradual decline in a single word: ‘drink’. The glass-fronted display cabinet housing some of her collection of ceramics by Hylton Nel is also an estate piece. It formerly belonged to Pat Pugh, aka Surgeon Captain PD Gordon Pugh, a Royal Navy surgeon who immigrated to South Africa and died a leading authority on Staffordshire-ware.
Dax’s many friendships and interests are mapped on the wall opposite these curiosity cabinets. There is an oil painting of a young John Nowers by his former lover, Nel. Dax acquired some of her prized collection of Nel’s ceramics through a mutually beneficial barter arrangement that involved exchanging books for works. Like Nel, Dax has an extensive personal library of books devoted to homes. The only books in this genre she doesn’t collect are those featuring the sort of fashionable homes that Higgovale is now famed for. ‘Modern and minimal,’ says Dax, whose home embodies the opposite. In its refutation of drab conformity, Dax’s home channels a tradition of bohemian opulence redolent of the homes of bygone painters Freida Lock and Irma Stern.
Although dominated by Nel’s ceramics and figurative woodcarvings by Johannes Mashego Segogela, photographs form an integral part of the décor. The guest bedroom is decorated with a large colour image taken in 1997 by Guy Tillim. It depicts residents of the Congolese town of Goma cheering a coup leader. In the library hangs a portrait of regular summer house-guests from Scotland, author Zoë Wicomb and artist Roger Palmer, who have accompanied Dax on treasure hunts for political ephemera at election rallies. There is also a small portrait of Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, a little-remembered poet, essayist and Africana specialist, who worked in the Cape Town archives for three decades.
Before she moved up the steep road to her current address, Dax lived in De Waterkant, then a poor hamlet overlooking the changing harbour. She fondly recalls the sound of steam engines and, less warmly, being bitten by a neighbourhood dog when returning home on her bicycle. Such biographical details are rare. Dax, a committed cyclist who has pedalled through France on tours with novelist JM Coetzee and poet Gus Ferguson, prefers to dwell on her objects, rather than divulge too much about her vivid personal life. Sometimes, though, the objects in her home have a mnemonic quality. A trio of portraits of black South Africans by acclaimed Modernist photographer Constance Stuart Larrabee is an occasion for a Proustian recall of things past.
‘She ended up living near my mother in Chestertown in Maryland, near Chesapeake Bay,’ says Dax of Larrabee, who left for the United States in 1949. ‘She became a dog breeder like my mother.’ Dax’s kitchen includes a watercolour of a dog by her mother, Ann Dax (née Dunlop). Trained at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, she returned to painting after her child-rearing years. Harbour scenes emerged as a favourite subject. Look carefully and this maritime interest is visible in Dax’s taste in décor too. Paintings and scale models of boats, both wind- and steam-powered, appear throughout the house, in window bays and in nooks, sometimes juxtaposed with photos and ceramics. This transformed quarryman’s cottage, which is flooded from all sides by the Cape’s abundant light, is not so subtly tied together by a nautical theme. ‘I live in a ship,’ summarises Dax.
For more details on Henrietta Dax’s bookshop, visit clarkesbooks.co.za
