Onrust and Vermont originated as two adjacent developments during te early 20th century.

 

In 1925 Vermont Seaside Township Ltd was established and the scheme was laid out on land acquired from University of Stellenbosch.

 

The house situated on Erf 559 is one of the few houses at Vermont dating to this period. It was built as a holiday house for Christman Joel Krige[1], second Speaker of the South African Parliament (1915 – 1925) in 1926, after he sold his house in Onrust to Moravian missionaries. He was also one of the directors of the Onrust River and Seaside Township & estate company Ltd which was established in 1902 and dissolved in 1912.[2]

 

The property was acquired by the Groenewald Family in 1932 and held in its ownership until 1995 when it was bought by the Spaarwater family who sold the house to the Avenant family during 2013.

 

In 1996 the house was converted into a guesthouse. It was during this period that changes were made to the house, including the enclosure of the stoep (porch) and the insertion of en-suite bathrooms.

 

It was not until the late 1930, that Onrust was developed as a holiday destination. Vermont remained sparsely developed until the 1980s when it eventually merged with Onrust.

 

From the early 1970s a number of well-known South African painters, poets and writers came to live in Onrust and Vermont, including Jan Rabie,[3] Marjorie Wallace[4], Uys Krige[5], Elsa Joubert[6], Gregoire Boonzaaier[7] and Cecil Higgs.[8] More recently, actress and film producer, Katinka Heyns[9] and writer husband Chris Barnard[10], acquired property in Vermont.

 

 

 

[1] Member of Parliament 1910 – 1933.

 

[2] Overstrand Heritage Survey 2009.

 

[3] Jan Sebastian Rabie (14 November 1920 - 16 November 2002) was an Afrikaans writer of short stories, novels and other literary works. He was included under the Sestigers a group of influential Afrikaans writers of the 1960s. His house in Vermont is situated directly behind Marine Drive Manor.

 

 

[4] Awarded The Order of Ikhamanga in Bronze for outstanding contributions to the visual arts in 2005,
Marjorie Wallace was born in Edinburgh in 1925, and trained at the Edinburgh College of Art, making such an impression with her early work that she became the youngest person to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy of Art.
In 1953, after an extensive European tour, she was working in Paris when she met and married the writer Jan Rabie, later a leading member of South Africa 's “ Sestigers ”, the young Turks of Afrikaans literature in the 1960s.

 

[5] Mattheus Uys Krige (4 February 1910 – 10 August 1987) was a South African writer of novels, short stories, poems and plays in both English and Afrikaans. Krige is counted among the so-called Dertigers("writers of the thirties"). He co-edited The Penguin Book of South African Verse (1968) with Jack Cope From 1931 to 1935 he lived in France and Spain, acquiring fluency in both languages. He played rugby for a club in Toulon in the south of France. He returned to South Africa in 1935 and began a writing career as a reporter . During World War II he was a war correspondent with the South African Army in North Africa. Captured at Tobruk in 1941, he was sent to Italy, spending two years in a prisoner of war camp from which he escaped to return to South Africa.

 

[6] Elsa Joubert rose to prominence with her novel Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena, which was translated into 13 languages and also staged as a drama.

 

[7] Gregoire Johannes Boonzaier (31 July 1909 Newlands, Cape Town - 22 April 2005 Onrus, near Hermanus) was a versatile and prolific South African painter of landscapes, portraits, still lifes, seascapes and figures in oil, watercolour, ink, wash, pencil and charcoal, and a large number of linocuts.

 

[8] One of the most significant SA female artists of her time. (28 June 1898, - 16 June 1986) She trained in London at the Byam Shaw School of Art, at Goldsmiths' College and, from 1926, at the Royal Academy of Arts Higgs was called back to South Africa, however, due to the illness of her mother, who died in 1934. Higgs held her first solo exhibition in the Domestic Science hall of Stellenbosch University in 1935, meeting the painter Wolf Kibel and the sculptor Lippy Lipshitz. In 1938, she held a joint exhibition with Rene Graetz, Maggie Laubser and Lippy Lipshitz. In 1938 she returned to Paris, however she left due to World War II.

 

[9] Katinka Heyns (1947-) is an important South African film producer, director and actress. Amongst her many acclaims are movies such as, Die Wondrwerker, Eendag op n Reendag, Feast of the Uninvited en Fiela se kind.

 

[10] Christiaan Johan Barnard (aka Chris Barnard) is a award winning South African author born July 15, 1939. Well known for penning various Afrikaans novels, novellas, columns, youth novels, short stories, plays, radio dramas, film scripts and television dramas. Amongst the many awards awarded to him are, the CAN Award (3) and the Hertzog Award (2).