You have probably visited the wine estate Groot Constantia and thus seen the majestic old manor house once occupied by Simon van Der Stell. I however wonder if you are aware of the unusual circumstances that led to the unusually large roof and windows of this historic building.
In 1792, whilst Hedrick Cloete still owned the farm, he decided to enlarge and improve the homestead. Initially there was a flat roofed gallery behind the front row of rooms. Cloete had the roof of both gallery and rooms removed and replaced with a traditional thatch roof. The new roof however now spanned 14 meters of building, double the width of a traditional house of the time. As a thatch roof requires a pitch of 50 degrees, to remain waterproof, the height of the roof therefore had to be doubled as well. Now that they were doubling the height of the roof, the existing walls would have been far to low to be in proportion, so they extended the height of the walls and the existing casement windows were replaced by tall sash windows. The next problem was that the front gable had to be heightened to match the size of the huge side gables. This left a large blank space above the gable window. Conveniently this was filled by a niche now containing a statue of Abundance with her horn of plenty. It would have been so much easier had Cloete just stuck to tradition but then alas we would not have this majestic building today.
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