They Came to Stay

Book excerpt: Massive brickwork resulting in a towering gable; hollowing out a hillside in order to achieve a T?plan; adding a whole new T to the front of an old one in order to avoid ending up with a crooked H?plan ? what did these owners have in mind when investing so much time, energy and money in remodelling their farm dwellings to make them comply with certain set patterns? The aim of this book is to find answers to this and a number of related questions in an endeavour to discover meaning in Cape colonial architecture through methods that involve more than relying on the study of archival documents only.