‘We entertain a lot and my husband was frustrated about the fact that we couldn’t sit up to 20 people around the dining table,’ she explains.

The solution was to extend the kitchen and dining room and open them up to the delicious greens of the back garden with floor-to-ceiling steel and glass windows.

Reminiscent of old cottage panes, the metal frames lend an industrial aesthetic to the house’s belly and create an airy, sunlight-splashed sense of space and height.

Lane’s utilitarian approach also makes her staunchly anti-clutter, so her home today is a picture of simplicity: a well-structured, open-plan portrait of clean vertical lines and carefully placed custom-designed furnishings featuring a measured palette of greys, light woods and whites with the odd cheeky stroke of yellow.

At its heart, it is a space of calm and quiet, an orderly escape from the confusing chaos of the outside world.

It goes without saying that the few treasures that have found their way onto shelves and into corners really warrant their place there: artworks and photographs from the couple’s many travels to Asia and beyond, crystal glassware received as a wedding gift, an antique trumpet picked up while on honeymoon and nostalgic old cricket balls from Lane’s husband’s primary school days.

‘We don’t search for stuff just to fill a space; we buy items that mean something to us as we come across them,’ she says.

This is a carefully curated home, after all, not a tangle of transient fancies.

Visit metaphordesign.co.za to learn more about Lane’s work.