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‘When we discover a nest it takes us back to … the child

should have had. For not many of us have been endowed

full measure of its cosmic implications.’1 Such are Gaston

philosophical musings on ‘… the naïve wonder we used to

we found a nest’. Design tutors everywhere enlist his Poe

 – more fairytale than architecture textbook – to argue fo

metaphorically rather than restricting architecture to the

building regulations and budget. Accustomed as we are to

writing about this latter kind of architecture – buildings o

 joy has been beaten by technical and managerial interpret

 – coming upon work that is genuinely poetic can be som

Everything seems heightened. Surfaces glow. Words fail and

In the case of Singita Lebombo, all the available superlat

already been used several times over: travel writers have

‘astonished’, ‘wowed’, and of course had their ‘breath take

by its near-perfect interplay of nature and architecture. Indlodge, located at the eastern extremity of the Kruger Nat

acknowledged as the last word in designer safari experien

top awards in travel glossies as well as the highest prize b

South African Institute of Architecture. How, in the satura

the luxury Big Five adventure,2 can good design move one

of the pack? The architects, Design Workshop, have answe

by going back to the basics of architecture: to poetry.

Theirs is a spatial poetics propounded in the architectu

Material pleasures are celebrated from the moment you d

Singita Lebombo. A stone and mud wall, massive and dirty

to meet you from what appears in the distant haze to be a

canopy cantilevered from a couple of dead trees. The wall’

and dark shadow serve to slow everything down for a yaw

but the crunch of gravel and sunlight flashing across the sm

approaching hostess and ranger serve to reanimate the sc

damp towels are quickly and quietly exchanged for the ca

the telepathically-controlled service that is a trademark o

hospitality kicks into gear.

As you follow the wall towards the heart of the lodge –

 – the ridge falls away and the view sharpens. Approached

the canopy’s end elevation appears as a cross section, its

BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY

SAFARI LODGE, K RUGER 

NATIONAL PARK , MPUMALANGA,

SOUTH AFRICA

ARCHITECT

DESIGN WORKSHOP

1Like outsize nestsor primitive huts,guest pavilions aresuspended lightly inthe landscape.2The mothership ofthe main lodge (top)presides over a smallfleet of individualguest suites.3Architecturecommuneseffortlessly withnature.4A rammed earth wallmarks the approachto the main lodge.

The wonder of the natural world is revealed and celebrated in this safari lodge.

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SAFARI LODGE, K RUGER NATIONAL 

PARK , MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA

ARCHITECT

DESIGN WORKSHOP

ground floor plan of main lodge (scale approx 1:1000)

  1 entrance walkway   2 cellar

3 lounge  4 library   5 bar  6 walkway to guest suites 7 external dining area

  8 deck   9 dining hall 10 kitchen 11 guest relations 12 manager’s office 13 administration 14 staff canteen 15 courtyard 16 l aundry and housekeeping 17 staff changing 18 rangers’ office 19 maintenance manager  20 deliveries and parking 21 bin store 22 service yard 23 store room

5Lounge in the main lodgeforms a social hub.6Despite being part of a largercomplex,pavilions are tactfullypositioned to preserve privacy.7Sybaritic pool.

site plan

plan of typical guest pavilion (scale approx 1:200)

cross section through lounge in main lodge

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  A Sweni River   B Nwanedzi River   C main lodge D guest pavilions  E shop/spa/gym  F Sweni Lodge G future management

accommodation

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rafters curving down towards the panorama like the closing fingers of

a giant fly trap. Mud and stone give way to an elaborately articulated

technology of sticks and screens; of nests and spiders’ webs. Uneven

twig-like timber blinds regulate the glare. The large split level area – with

retractable glass doors on three sides (to keep animals out at night) – is

shaped by little more than a roof and a floor, complete with immaculate

soft furnishings. Organic wall-fragments, looped in plan, curl upwards to

form service nooks. This space is the living room for the lodge, which

propagates across the ridge in a series of discrete hut-like guest suites

that cannot be directly seen from the clubhouse. As you survey the

awesome Lebombo mountains, on and into which the lodge is built, your

hostess melts into nowhere just as mysteriously as she first appeared.

Backstage functionality is essential to the operational dynamics of

any luxury safari lodge. The staff to guest ratio at Singita Lebombo is

four to one – easy to believe when each visiting party has its own game

ranger, tracker and waiter. And these are just the staff one actually sees:an army of others invisibly clean, cook, guard and maintain the front of

house. Careful site planning keeps such ongoing activity hidden without

appearing to conceal it.

For increasingly wealthy holidaymakers the most prized commodity

has become seclusion. Accordingly, the ‘non-hotel’ – in which you need

not ever meet another guest – is booming. Such developments typically

link individual pavilions, scattered across a landscape, with a shared

building that supplants the grand hotel model’s foyer. Small and remote

is now synonymous with exclusive and discreet: Singita Lebombo has

15 guest suites, each a building in its own right; Singita Sweni, its sultry

sister lodge on the river bank below, has only six. Each lodge has a

clubhouse but they share a village comprising boutiques, a gym, a spa and

a curio shop.

Maintaining the fiction of being alone in the wild depends on a close

fit between spatial and logistical aspects of the site plan. Each suite is

painstakingly positioned so that it is completely private. Access to the

clubhouse is by open boardwalk – at night with an armed escort to and

from your room so that you don’t end up as a big cat’s dinner – which

makes servicing suites, remote as they are, far from straightforward.

Carefully orchestrated safari activities, including twice-daily game drives,

allow towels to be changed, pillows to be fluffed, and air-conditioner

coolant to be topped up.

All this effort must be invested in getting guests out of their suites

because it is tempting just to stay there, luxuriating in the paradoxical

sentiment of solitude in a vast landscape. This user-experience is micro-

engineered, the architecture regulating immersion in the moment. The

suites – little more than nest-like platforms covered by sketchy canopies

 – suspend guests in an in-between condition: in a dialogue between

intense contemplation and the extended wilderness. This spatial condition

is both a pause but also a cyclic exchange, which generates a kind of

animating energy experienced as well-being. Suspending its occupants

‘between earth and sky’, as Design Workshop partner Janina Masojada

puts it, the suites hang above the ground on stilts. The land remains the

property of the state-owned Kruger, and under the terms of a 20-year

concession the buildings themselves are temporary. For Masojada this

design constraint – curbing architecture’s impact on the environment

 – echoes our ethical relationship with the planet as human beings: ‘there

is no such thing as ownership. You are borrowing from the land’.

Releasing the imagination, this lodge’s experiential poetry alsoprovides a release from the constraints of safari culture. So many resorts

style themselves according to the false nostalgia of the Great White

Hunter, capturing nature and wildlife in the crosshairs of a destructive

tradition. Singita Lebombo’s triumph has been to actually reinvent

 – through architecture – what safari means, without compromising

its power to astonish and invigorate. And in so doing it rekindles our

wonder at the world. MATTHEW BARAC

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p93.

2 In game watching, the Big Five are lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and black rhinoceros.

SAFARI

K RUGE

PARK , M

SOUTH

ARCHITE

DESIGN

Architect

Design Workshop,Durban

Concept team

Design Workshop,Joy Brasler Architect,

Cecile & Boyd

Structural engineer

Arup

Mechanical engineer

Langford Associates

Interior design

Cecile & Boyd

Photographs

Dennis Gilbert/VIEW

8The fiction of beingalone in the wild iscarefully orchestrated.9The faux primitiveexterior conceals anelegantly appointedinterior for thediscerning tourist.10Buildings physicallymerge with thelandscape.11The magical panoramaof landscape and lightfrom a typical pavilion.

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