Art, coffee, imagination

Living in Britain I’m always struck by the fact that coffee houses, pubs and casual restaurants are so often part of a chain (meaning they have the same menu, same décor, same … same …), and even if not, how rarely they show any real spark of difference, individuality, creativity or imagination.

Visiting Cape Town inevitably brings the point home for me – as friends tell me the newest places to go for coffee, breakfast, lunch, I wonder how I’ll fit them all in to my time, along with the old favourite places. I grab my camera, my appetite, an old friend to catch up with, and go off to marvel at the innovative spirit and endless capacity for creating beauty and interest in even the most ordinary surroundings that Capetonians are famous for …


In town, Haas Coffee Collective,  specialising in exotic and rare coffees, was one of my new finds this visit ...

You can sit outside on the pavement or in a tiny sunny courtyard at the rear (above), but the real interest is inside, where the decor is a wonderful Africa- meets-Europe eclectic mix ...

The coffee shop is partly situated inside Haas's Design Collective - a quirky, diverse gallery of pictures, paintings, new and found objects and artefacts sourced from local artists ... 

It's hard to leave this place, with piles of interesting books to read over coffee, and art-work to explore ...

Haas Coffee Collective, 67 Rose Street, Bo-Kaap
But leave one must, eventually, and since Haas is in the Bo-Kaap - a historic area on the slopes of Signal Hill above the city centre - you can work off the delish food by taking a walk up and down these steep cobbled streets ...

These brightly painted homes go back to the 17th century when the area was settled by freed slaves, mostly of Malay origin. Despite being gentrified to a large extent recently, it's still the home and cultural heart of Cape muslims.

Table Mountain (top left) and Signal Hill (centre) are the backdrops to the Bo-Kaap

You'll hear the muezzins call to prayer from the mosques in this area, and at midday the noon-day gun - the cannon that fires daily from Signal Hill, since 1806, as a time signal for ships in the harbour. And a little down the road, towards the city centre, are the sounds of drums from live musicians in Long Street and Pan-African culture in the shops and markets around Greenmarket Square ...

This is going to have to be just the first of a few posts on Cape Town eating style. Haas was selected by design magazine Wallpaper last year as one of its top 20 reasons to be in South Africa, and I can think of so many more ...

(And on a different note, since Picnik closed and with it my go-to collage facility, I was thrilled to find a brilliant tutorial from a blogger here on Something Swanky explaining how to make a collage on Picmonkey despite the fact that they don't offer this yet. I've since wasted happy hours of my life playing with pictures, unconstrained by ready-made templates - I highly recommend taking a look if you have a collage addiction).