A six-month project, designer Naeem Biviji thought when he first saw the pair of 1950s cottages in a roughly one-acre compound in Nairobi that he and his wife, Bethan Rayner, hoped to refurbish rapidly. Instead, it took them 15 years.

In 2004, Naeem and Bethan, who had recently completed architecture degrees in Scotland, weren’t too concerned about shaping a home for themselves. However, Naeem’s parents had acquired the cottages, which were close to their home in Nairobi’s Westlands area, where he grew up. He and Bethan, who is English, decided to fix them up the following year. They set up Studio Propolis, their design/build office and furniture workshop, in Nairobi’s industrial area and soon got to work.

Originally built for a postal worker and a groundskeeper, the colonial cottages looked neglected. Nonetheless, the rectangular stone-masonry structures, totaling about 1,480 square feet, were picturesque. Plastered and painted white, with red clay tiles covering their wood-framed hip roofs, and perched beside the forested Karura nature preserve, they seemed far from the city.

“This was not a linear design process. This was a hands-on, handmade process.”
—Naeem Biviji, designer and resident

With less than $150,000 to make any changes, Naeem and Bethan decided to prepare the cottages for contemporary living with built-ins and additions they could make by hand. “We started to think of what we could salvage from the site and how we could reuse it. It was an incremental thing,” Naeem says. “As our skills evolved, so did our thinking.” They learned that decks were much more feasible for them to build than floor slabs, for instance. “We were also learning how a building could be made by just two people,” Bethan says, and prefabricating small, manageable steel components that they could lift into place easily became their strategy.

The couple took the house apart, surgically undoing the doors, windows, and built-ins. They downed false ceilings to reveal rafters that they replaced and later covered with cypress boards. They stacked and stored materials for reuse—especially scarce cedarwood. They tore out old dust-covered parquet floors and exchanged them for sleek black terrazzo installed by professionals, while they poured their own cement footings and cut tile and glass.

Frequently, the size of materials determined the design of furnishings instead of vice versa. For example, mismatched glass offcuts from windows they made for other projects were turned into their windows here, and offcuts from doors were built into unusual furniture and extra-tall armoires. A new gatehouse that conceals water tanks is a collage of wood and steel scraps. The couple’s hands-on approach gave them “maximum learning potential,” Bethan says. “I measured and cut. Naeem joined and welded.”

The results are flexible spaces—of indoor/outdoor areas—in lieu of cramped, prescribed rooms. The entry door, relocated from the front to the left side of the main cottage, now opens directly into living spaces, and the kitchen, moved from the front to a back corner, opens to the outdoors and to new decks on steel stilts. A large opening cut into the living room’s back wall allows the space to flow into a 250-square-foot, nine-foot-high gabled extension made of steel and wood parts the designers prefabricated at their shop.

The extension also hovers on stilts, and its giant, north-facing sliding window is aimed at previously ignored forest views. Its west wall, made of wood salvaged from the old roof, pockets away, exposing the interior to trellised spaces outdoors. “This room is treated as a sheltered deck,” Naeem explains. An entry bridge linking it to the garden amplifies the notion. The caretaker hut, similarly refurbished, is a guest space. Throughout the home, Naeem and Bethan’s juxtaposition of careful details and the often-imprecise contours of the masonry buildings blends the precision of modern construction systems with the warmth of handcraft.

Fifteen years later, just as the project neared completion, the pandemic struck and forced the couple to retreat to Naeem’s childhood home. They eventually finished in 2021. What took them so long? Nairobi’s notorious stop-and-start permitting process was one reason, and a shortage of building materials compounded the delays. “Even with forests around, good, durable wood is hard to find,” Naeem explains.

However, the forced intervals had a silver lining. The couple spent time raising their two kids, now 9 and 11, and gathered skills they could use at home and on the job. They learned to stitch fabric and make quirky leather puppets from offcuts and children’s furniture from leftover wood.

“For us the design process is iterative, a series of ideas, rather than a light-bulb thing.”
—Bethan Rayner, designer and resident

Larger jobs followed, and the workshop hummed even when the home project was stalled. The furniture and monumental entry doors the pair designed for a modern cathedral by John McAslan and Partners in rural Kenya led to invitations to speak at design venues, including Cape Town’s Design Indaba conference. Subsequently, Ikea invited Naeem and Bethan to design furniture and tableware, and then, in 2017, the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu invited Studio Propolis to design her new painting studio. “Each of these projects benefited from the experiments at the cottage,” Naeem says, adding, “The idea of a complete work—designing everything and, in our case, making most of it too—has become integral to the way we work.”

By the time the pandemic lockdowns were lifted about two years ago, the couple had returned to Great Britain and were seeking renters for their so-called Recycled House. Enter Verena Phipps, an American who works in international development in Nairobi, and her partner, Steve Coomans, an entrepreneur from South Africa. They took one look at the modernized stone cottages and were mesmerized. “We were overwhelmed by how beautiful it all was,” Verena says.

To the designers’ delight, the renters have claimed the spaces as if they were made just for them and have introduced their own eclectic furnishings. And the wood-and-steel extension that frames the views and opens so easily to the outdoors has unexpectedly turned Verena and Steve into naturalists.

“It is like a tree house. We look out and see the forest,” Verena says. From here she and Steve can spot monkeys and other visitors like antelope, deer, dik-diks, snakes, and long-crested eagles. “Beautiful sunbirds come into the living room when the doors are pushed open,” Verena adds. “They think they are still outside.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Studio Propolis ltd.

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