CLARENS PENTHOUSE

Above the City, Beyond the Ordinary
Some projects simply get built. Others are truly earned. This penthouse, crowning an apartment block in the shadow of Lion's Head and Signal Hill, belongs firmly to the latter.

Project: Clarens Penthouse
Location: Fresnaye, Cape Town, South Africa
Type: Multi-Residential
Status: Completed 2025
Project Team: Annemie van den Heever & Christiaan van Aswegen
Awards: Scape Awards of Excellence Residential Block of the Year Winner
Photography & Videography: Honeyman Films

From the outset, this was a project that demanded patience, creative resolve, and an unwillingness to compromise. The result speaks for itself — recognised with the Scape Apartment Block of the Year award in 2024, and crowned by a penthouse that represents the very best of what the building set out to achieve.

The building is immediately recognisable: warm blush render that shifts with the Cape light, lush planting spilling from every terrace, and a perforated screen facade that throws dramatic geometric shadows throughout the day.

The penthouse unfolds as a series of generous, connected spaces where indoors and outdoors blur effortlessly. Crazy paving flows continuously from interior living rooms out onto wraparound terraces, with Lion's Head commanding the horizon and the city stretching away to the sea. A sculptural glass-block rotunda houses the spiral staircase, filtering light in ways that change with every hour of the day.

A freestanding bathtub positioned before full-height glazing, framed by treetops, captures the penthouse's quiet philosophy — luxury through connection to landscape and light, rather than ostentation. Above it all, the rooftop pool — curved at one end and lush with indigenous planting — feels less like an amenity and more like a secret garden suspended above the city.