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HOUSE TOUR | ROOMS & GARDENS | CABANA MAGAZINE
"Do you believe in signs?" asks South African ceramicist Cara Bauermeister, whose return to clay began with two fragments of buried porcelain unearthed in the garden of her Somerset West home. Emma Becque visits the artist's farmhouse and studio, where a lifelong fascination with craftsmanship, collecting and the natural world has shaped both the interiors and her coveted ceramics.
BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 15 SEPTEMBER 2026
A stitched sheepskin kaross lies across the guest bedroom, recalling the traditional cloaks used for centuries by the Khoikhoi and San communities of Southern Africa © Inge Prins.
Indigenous Orchids, Irises and Camellias gathered only moments earlier from the garden stand in almost every room of Cara Bauermeister's house, their stems arching from tulipieres, bulbous planters and porcelain vases of her own making. They seem so entirely at home that it is difficult to imagine a time when Bauermeister couldn't find a contemporary vessel with the qualities she admired in antique pieces, yet that absence set everything in motion.
A decade ago, before ceramics became her daily practice, Bauermeister and her husband were eager to leave Cape Town. “The first place we viewed was actually our house. I still have a picture of my husband's face when we viewed it, astonished at how perfect it was.”
Reached by an avenue of old oak trees, with mountains rising beyond an established garden, the property felt unlike anywhere else they had seen. “I fell in love immediately,” she says, only for the owner to withdraw it from the market. "We were devastated," she recalls. Months later, almost absent-mindedly, she searched the address online one afternoon. "Do you believe in signs?" she asks, laughing. By chance, the farmhouse had come back onto the market that very day. Within hours, they made an offer.
Soon after moving in, Bauermeister began reclaiming the garden, digging through beds that had been left untended for years. Beneath the soil lay old blue-and-white fragments, discarded long before her arrival. Meanwhile, the surrounding terrain was producing armfuls of flowers, and she found herself searching for vases to display her bouquets.
"I couldn't find anything that I imagined," she recalls. Rather than persist in looking, she began to create pottery, something she had not seriously considered since childhood classes remembered less for the clay than for the teacher's enormous Irish wolfhound. What began as an attempt to make something for her own space has since become one of South Africa's most distinctive ceramic practices.
Bauermeister grew up spending weekends on her family's farm in the Cederberg, where childhood meant looking for curious stones and shale to split in search of fossils. That instinct to look more closely was nurtured by her father, who spent Sundays taking her in search of Rembrandt, Cape Dutch houses and overlooked corners of the landscape. "My father taught me how to enjoy observing my surroundings," she says. "It is such an incredible gift."
"My cabinet of curiosities is my constant source; the items are prototypes for more ideas," she explains. The shells, weathered rope, driftwood and carved fragments she once gathered reappear throughout her ceramics, translated into hand-modelled scallop sconces, porcelain festoons and architectural follies. A serpentine branch becomes the foot of one of her earthenwares; the fanned structure of a shell reappears in sculpted wall decor; the eroded surface of driftwood inspires the texture of a Scirocco vase, while gilded details borrowed from an 18th-century painting find their way onto the tiles of her tulipières.
Before becoming a ceramicist, Bauermeister trained as a printmaker at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, then remained there to lecture in conceptual drawing, theory, and printmaking. Teaching, she admits, gradually left too little room for making. "Whenever I made my own work, I rushed." When she and her husband left Cape Town for the Winelands, she also left behind the enormous offset printing press that had anchored her practice. "I come from a strict Fine Art background where it is severley frowned upon to create a vase," she laughs.
Prior to finding their way into clay, many ideas begin here, among shelves of Delftware, Chinese export porcelain and English transferware © Inge Prins.
Inside, every nook and cranny is occupied. A monumental view of the Colosseum, found in a local antique shop, greets visitors in the entrance hall of the 1905 farmhouse. "I like humorous things," Bauermeister smiles. Nearby, a Staffordshire transferware plate by John Rogers & Son depicting a chinoiserie landscape and a zebra rider is cherished as much for its story of cultural exchange as for its connection to the family's Cape mountain zebra farm. "It is deeply sentimental," she says. Elsewhere, the walls remain white, although Bauermeister insists that, "white is never white; it is always a tone of a cast or a shadow for what it presents".
Asked if there is one room she'd never change, Bauermeister barely pauses before answering: "I could live in my bedroom". Bathed in balmy yellow and wrapped in Bryher Rose wallpaper in Lapis Blue by House of Hackney, it is noticeably warmer than the rest of the house, centered around a Victorian agrarian bamboo bed rescued from an antique dealer's garden shed. "Nobody wanted it," she recalls. Suspended above are dried oak leaves foraged from a local farm. Encased butterflies collected since she was 16 hover around the headboard, where fruits, stones and glassware are propped on a Japanese parquetry box. “It feels like a deconstructed 18th-century Dutch still life," she says. "Objects I choose often reflect that symbolism."
In the peach colored bathroom, an Art Nouveau textile hangs where another designer might have settled for a blind, prompting a rethink of the room. "I got that, and then I had to change the whole room," she laughs. “For me, a room begins with a textile." A Turkish suzani has reshaped a guest suite, while a blue-and-gold Buddhist kesa inspired the complete rearrangement of the sitting room. "My husband becomes quite worried when I go on another fabric outing," she says. "With a piece of fabric, you buy the possibility of so many things."
Beyond the house, her small garden studio is divided between making and collecting. Ceramics are crafted downstairs, while upstairs has become a personal archive of art history literature, gemstones, Napoleonic straw boxes, bottled grains found in the Cape terrain – a library she describes as, "worth nothing and yet everything". Here, research, concocting and making collapse into one another; subjects are constantly moved, compared and reconsidered. "It's nice when you can make intellectual connections between objects," she says. "It's boring if everything works together."
A recent acquisition, an 18th-century mirror, was given a rigorous salt bath before crossing the threshold. "I just needed to cleanse the energy," she laughs. "It had an unusual aura." Her interiors, much like her ceramics, are almost entirely free of human figures. "I'm a private person," she explains, "so I avoid anything where a human figure is portrayed. For some reason, I find it confrontational." The only exception is Bonaparte, her British bull terrier, whom she affectionately describes as "the most hilarious shaped item in the space" and, inevitably, "the bull in the china shop".
“When making work, I stay true to what I find beautiful and create pieces I would want to live with myself,” she says. “For me, it is about craftsmanship, originality and integrity rather than following trends.” She once described the cottage as a "flower press". Looking around, it feels as though almost every object is waiting for another life in clay.
Bauermeister's creations draw on centuries of craftsmanship, allowing techniques, materials and motifs to travel across geographies and generations. © Inge Prins.
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