The Montebello Design Centre is a non-profit art and craft space established in 1993 and located in Newlands, Cape Town, South Africa. The centre hosts over twenty craft workshops, shops, restaurants, and artist studios.
History Situated beneath Devil's Peak, the design centre stands in what was once a substantial tract of woods. Described on 6 May 1652 as a, "fine, large forest of very tall, straight growing trees"Journal of Jan van Riebeeck. Vol 1 page 37. English edition, A. A. Balkema, 1952 these lands were the hunting and grazing grounds of the Khoisan Cochoqua people. Remnants of these original forests can still be seen on the lower slopes of the mountain. The Dutch East India Company established the brewer Ruttgert Menssink on the site in 1696.Rogues Rebels and Runaways. Chapter 1, page 11. Nigel Penn. David Philip, 1999
By the late 19th century the area was an outlying suburb of Cape Town. After the break-up of the original Pappenboom Estate, Daniel Cloete, owner of the Newlands Brewery, purchased a section of the Pappenboom estates and built a mansion. This existing homestead later became the South African College School's Michaelis House. The adjacent face brick stables currently housing the Montebello Design Centre were built in about 1880. The complex is considered one of the finest of its period in South Africa.Montebello Stable Site, ERF 124334 Newlands Impact Assessment Stage 1. Jan 2003
Cape Town brewer Anders Ohlsson purchased the estate from Cloete in 1888 and named it Montebello.Southern Suburbs Tatler 11 July 1991 Ohlsson, who established Ohlsson's Brewery on the site sometime after 1881.
Montebello sits on the site of the brewery's stables which housed the horses that helped support the brewery's logistical operations. The site was sold to the randlord Max Michaelis in 1919 when automotives started replacing horse-drawn wagons. His son, the artist Cecil Michaelis, first experimented with South African clays and kaolin in the late 1940s.Montebello Estate Cecil Michaelis
Design centre Prior to returning to South Africa, Cecil Michaelis' 1935 founding of Rycotewood College for the arts and skilled associated trades in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, had convinced him an equivalent institution sited at Montebello would succeed in a country where much creative expression was still seen as derivative.Cape Times 16 April 1997 First mooted in the 1950s,Obituary for Cecil Michaelis, Tessa Graaff, UCT Monday Paper Vol 16, No 14, 1997 this ideal would take over thirty years to be realised.
Following the expropriation of the main house and estate from the Michaelis family to house South African College Schools the remaining stables were donated to University of Cape Town in 1988 on condition that a craft and design centre would be established on it. A further financial bequest by Cecil Michaelis allowed for the establishment of the Montebello Design Centre in 1993.
Notable residencies John Bauer, potter. David Krut, art publisher and dealer.
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