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Designers had to move heaven and a lot of earth to let travelers live out their fantasies among French antiques or in a Zulu camp at Douw Steyn’s South African retreat.
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Like most new-money billionaires, controversial insurance magnate Douw Steyn makes things happen. It's how he built Auto & General insurance in his native South Africa from the ground up, and what brought success when he expanded to the U.K. with Budget Insurance. And it's why he permits himself the finer things. As someone who lives large, he has a taste for exclusivity and something of a soap-opera personal life that's provided tabloid fodder. In true Steyn style, compromise was no part of the design brief to convert his Waterberg Mountain estate into the luxury Shambala Game Reserve, even if nature and logistics stood in the way.
Len Lategan, Shambala's staff architect and principal agent during the project, says Steyn had very definite ideas about the reserve's redesign. Mere topography wasn't allowed to intervene. The buildings had to blend into the scenery so as not to interrupt the environment's natural beauty. "For example, he wanted big trees to be positioned in front of the main lodge to hide it as much as possible," Lategan says.
Accomplishing that required ingenuity. There was little soil on the rocky hillside where the main building, Steyn Lodge, is sited. That meant trees could not be planted directly in the ground, so workers had to build gigantic planter boxes. "An enormous amount of concrete and steel went into them to achieve the strength to hold all the necessary soil and trees," says Lategan.
Steyn's brief for the seven French-inspired guest chalets was equally specific: Don't ruin the skyline. Lategan and his team kept the roof-lines low and nestled the thatched-roof guest quarters into a small hill behind the main building. That solution does more than preserve views of this pristine landscape; it affords a level of privacy Shambala's high-spend market demands.
Quantifying distances and areas in the bush is a unique challenge, says managing operator Tj Steyn, Douw's son. Building in harmony with the environment, in this case, meant literally measuring rocks and trees and working around them. "This is the reason many contractors don't like to work from a plan in the bush. They need to be as flexible as the terrain is varied."
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