Cape Town studio, working drawing by drawing
Travis Ronaldson is an architectural designer and interior stylist based in Cape Town. The work sits mostly in residential renovations, small commercial fit-outs and furniture detailing, with projects in Observatory, Woodstock, Sea Point and the Southern Suburbs. Every entry here shows the brief, the site constraint, the drawing set and the finished room, including notes on joinery, timber selection and tile layouts.
Plans, sections and axonometrics carry the story as much as the photography does. If you are a homeowner, a trade client or a design studio, you can request a studio visit or send a drawing set for review.
Observatory cottage rear extension: stepped courtyard, saligna window frames, lime-washed brick pier holding the old wall line.
Most enquiries start with a measured drawing that no longer matches the house, or a room that has three doors and no wall left for storage. Send what you have, even if it is a phone photo of the existing plan and a note about the constraint you cannot move. You will get a straight answer on whether a drawing review is enough or whether the job needs a site measure first.
Or write to info@travisronaldson.com
Every project starts with the same question: what does this room actually need to do? The answers below are the parts of the process that clients tell me made the difference, whether the job was a Sea Point flat or a warehouse bay in Woodstock.
Drawing set
You leave with a set a builder can price from: existing and proposed plans, a section through the tricky junction, and an axonometric of the joinery run. No guessing on site about where the wall line lands.
Materials
Timber samples, tile modules and paint swatches laid out together before anything is ordered. Saligna, oak-veneered ply, lime-washed brick, cork. You see how the palette reads in daylight, not on a screen.
Site
I measure the rooms myself, including the things that cause trouble later: a floor that slopes 90 mm across a bay, a door swing that clips the counter, a boundary you cannot move. Those numbers go into the drawings.
Detailing
Wardrobe, desk, bed alcove and kitchen tall units resolved in one elevation, with the sliding panel and the recessed work zone shown where they meet. The cabinetmaker gets a drawing, not a conversation.
Budget
Keeping the wet core in place, leaving services exposed, running tiles to full modules so the visible edge has no cuts. The money goes to glazing and floors, and the notes explain where it went.
After
Finished rooms shot alongside the drawings, so you can see the brief, the constraint and the result in one place. Useful if you sell later, or if you want to repeat a detail in another room.
Trade clients and design studios can ask for a drawing review before committing to a scope. Homeowners usually start with a studio visit. See the services page for how each stage runs, or look through projects to find a brief close to yours.
Three entries that sit closest to the questions people usually bring to a first meeting: how a tight site gets light, how an old shell gets reused, and how one wall can carry a whole flat. Each one shows the brief, the drawing set and the finished room.
Observatory
A 4.2 m deep boundary and a fig tree that stayed put. The wet core held its position, the glazing and floor took the spend, and the heritage roofline reads unchanged from the street.
Woodstock
A 68 sqm warehouse bay with a 90 mm slope across the floor. A raised timber platform levels the work zone, services stay visible, and the pinboard wall is detailed down to the cork thickness.
Sea Point
Three doors on one wall became a single 6.4 m run in oak-veneered ply: wardrobe, recessed desk, bed alcove and kitchen tall units. The desk slides shut at the end of the day.
More measured drawings, site photography and material boards sit in the full project index.