The Old Castle Brewery Building at 6 Beach Road in Woodstock, Cape Town, was designed to look like a castle because it was. Built in 1900 and completed in 1902, it was created as a flagship statement for Castle Lager, with turrets, pointed arches, and a tall tower that helped lock the brand into public memory.
Under the medieval look was a modern idea for its time. The structure used a fireproof steel skeleton frame, and the project’s components were shipped from the United States. The brewery was designed by New York architect and engineer H. Steinmann, who also oversaw the installation of a fermentation system with steel and glass-enamelled tanks from the Pfaudler Company in Rochester, New York. The reported cost was £120 000.
For mason contractors, the most interesting details are in the walls. The brewery was built with solid English-bond brickwork, sitting on a base of Table Mountain sandstone. That mix of brick and stone still reads as permanent, even after the building’s use shifted and its openings were altered over time.
After Castle stopped brewing there in 1955, the building took a hard industrial turn when I&J converted much of it into cold rooms. Windows were bricked up, heavy infrastructure went in, and by the 1980s the landmark was badly deteriorated. Architect Willem Otten and Otten + Partners Architects began undoing those changes, removing cold-room installations and reopening infilled windows. The result is an adaptive reuse success story that is now about 90% let, with roughly 90 tenants.
One detail stands out for anyone who’s ever priced a “no return” repair on a historic structure. When the cone-shaped roof of the tower decayed past saving, the team rebuilt it anyway. They assembled a new steel-framed “witch-hat” roof on the ground with timber cladding and thin slate tiles, then craned it into place. Today, the restored 40m tower once again crowns the building.
Read the full, original article from Mail & Guardian here.