Roehampton Court

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Last Updated: July 7, 2025

About Roehampton Court

Roehampton Court is a multi-storied building, constructed in the Art Deco style, with twelve floors above street level as well as two levels of roof structures. The building was designed with shops at ground floor level and apartments on the remaining floors. This kind of “modernistic” architecture was the product of reinforced concrete construction technology whereby a reinforced concrete frame supported free columns, slabs and cantilevered slabs (the latter for projecting balconies). Johannesburg’s structural concrete design engineers in the 1930’s developed an easy expertise in this technology, working to the common Johannesburg property grid of stands that were 50 Cape Feet in width – and Roehampton Court exemplifies this approach to construction technology. The façade is characterised by features that were shared with other apartment buildings of the era, particularly the use of projecting thin vertical bands in the central section of the main façade, projecting balconies with rounded corners, corner windows, and the use of decorative panels to the second-floor balconies.

The entire street facing façade relies on an expressive symmetry that is also typical of many Art Deco constructions of that time, and the stepped back form of the building from the tenth floor upwards affords this building a formal “status by association” in that the most prominent skyscrapers of the day, in both Johannesburg and cities like New York, employed this aesthetic device. The steel window frames are a feature of the architecture of the 1930’s – mass-produced and even standard-sized steel windows were freely available from 1922 onwards. The fine details of the façade and its decorative panels that depict African wildlife lent distinction to the building when it was first constructed and these features still lend it distinction today.

State of Conservation

The exterior of the building has been altered very little (this refers mostly to changes to the shopfronts). The external condition is good, but internally the building is run-down and in need of repair. The facade was restored in 2005, involving the cleaning and revitalization of the sandstone. As of 2025, the building looks run down, like many others in the area.

Adress

232 Bree Street

History

Completed in 1936, Roehampton Court was designed by the well-known architectural firm of J.C. Cook & Cowan. In 1939 additions designed by Harris & Green Architects created a new block of eight stories linking with the staircase and lift at the rear of the existing building.

For much of the twentieth century, the building accommodated lower to middle-class whites seeking to live conveniently close to places of work. In more recent years, Roehampton Court has continued to serve a similar function for black residents in the city center.

Statement of Significance

Roehampton Court, with its well-preserved external façade, is a notable example of the Art Deco Legacy of Johannesburg’s building boom of the 1930’s. ‘Art Deco’ found exuberant expression in the commercial spirit of Johannesburg as it recovered from the Great Depression and embarked on a building boom that marked its transition from a provincial mining town to a world-class metropolis. To quote Clive Chipkin, “Johannesburg’s post-Depression architecture, far more than its Victorian and Edwardian predecessors, was to become highly characteristic of this mushroom metropolis and peculiarly expressive of its deeply eclectic commercial spirit. Here was the epicentre in South Africa of that architectural style which has been labelled retrospectively Art Deco.” He goes on to state that “…Art Deco was not a consistent movement with a hard intellectual core…On the contrary it was a highly eclectic commercial styling on the fringes of Beaux-Arts architecture, Expressionism and mainstream Modern Movement.” In the case of Roehampton Court, not only is it distinguished by the fine details and aesthetic details of the front façade, which were executed in characteristic Art Deco manner, but it is also distinguished by virtue of the inclusion of decorative panels depicting local wildlife, which bring a seldom-seen and uniquely African flavour to a style that was drawn from precedents in the United States, the most powerful of the latter being the New York Skyline, considered at the time to be “the dazzling, definitive image of the early modern metropolis” . Roehampton Court remains intact as a testament to the development in the 1930’s of an African Metropolis that was dazzling in its own modernity.

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Legal Status

General Protection: Section 34(1) Structures under the National Heritage Resources Act, 1999.