Montreux Flats, Cape Town

This morning I tagged along for the encore Port Melbourne Art Deco walk repeated because the original walk two weeks ago had been so popular. It was part of the City of Port Phillip Walks Program and you may feel it is a long way from Cape Town. Frankly you'd be correct.

However, one of the walkers was originally from South Africa and remembered a particular block of flats in Queen Victoria Street in Cape Town with wonderful rounded balconies. I had been to the 7th World Congress on Art Deco in Cape Town in 2003 but I couldn't recall the flats she was referring to until Robin Grow, President of the Art Deco and Modernism Society and leader of the walk remembered a block of flats near the Gardens in downtown Cape Town.

The Company Gardens in Cape Town have an interesting history as I have found out from an article by Stewart Harris in the 7th Edition of the Vernacular Architecture Society of South Africa (VASSA) entitled How the garden grew: A brief spatial history of the Cape Town Gardens.

The gardens were founded in the 1650s by the Dutch East India Company and changed shape and purpose through successive Governments and the encroaching city to become the gardens of today.

The passage in Stewart's article which drew my attention concerned the development of Queen Victoria Street, bordering the gardens, which in the late 1920s and 1930s acquired more grand buildings including a block of flats called Montreux in 1936.

Now back to 2003 the Congress included a visit to Montreux to view a flat that had been furnished with locally produced pieces.

The furniture was fantastic but so was the metalwork on the stairways and internal balconies overlooking the central courtyard.

Not to mention the internal wooden doors with small diamond shaped windows and stepped vertical patterns both on the door panel and the surrounds.

I have no idea how I could have forgotten this wonderful block of flats.