Jaap Boonstra, the local architect who did the beautiful and sensitive restoration, thought that the house may have originally been a modest Victorian flat-pack house that were used extensively in the early days and was built sometime in the early 1920s.
Just on the other side of the police station in Church Street there is a beautifully restored house cladded with corrugated iron. This house attracted and was owned by spinsters and bachelors for many years. One of the first residents was Ms Naude who was responsible for invigilating the standard six public exams at the Clarens Primary School, then Ms Fick, who also worked at the school, lived in the house for many years.
Sometime in the 1930’s the bachelor Juan Max Frost, affectionately known to the locals as Jack, bought the house, living there for some 50 years until he sold it in the early 1980’s to move into an old age home in Bethlehem. Mr Jack Frost was the owner of Clarens Trading Store which was the only store in town at that time. He had been a fighter pilot during the 2nd World War and also been a racing car driver. The village kids liked to visit him as he would show them his German Luger, Spitfire helmet and “Mae West” life jacket. A few years before he died he moved to a house on the corner of Sias Oosthuizen and Swart Streets where he had a beautiful garden and trimmed hedge that he trimmed into shapes of animals. He also owned a big apple orchard next door to his house, local children fought to be allowed to mow his grass between the fruit trees as he was the only one who had a motorised lawn mower. He also serviced his own black Vauxhall.
By 1980 when Annetjie Muller sketched the house it was still cladded with corrugated iron and appeared to be in good shape but from there it became dilapidated and also stood empty for many years.
In the early 1990’s the house was sold to someone who it seems did not have much time for it, so the house stood virtually abandoned for many years.
When Adrian Smallpiece and Richard Pender bought the house, it was with the aim of restoring the house and rescuing it from ruin. Frost House as it stands today is not completely original, but the current owners were able to restore the badly dilapidated building and keep the exterior changes to an absolute minimum and the house’s footprint is still very much the same apart from the patio out the back. The wooden floor is 100 percent original to the house and the owners were very insistent that our builder Jacques Viljoen did not sand the wooden floor down – worried that they would lose the almost 100-year-old patina and surprisingly the floor actually survived mostly undamaged all those years of neglect. About 3 walls needed to be rebuilt due to the extent of damage. The village butcher ‘Riempies’ donated the doorbell and the late Helen Boucher who was a local farmer built the garden. The photos show the faithful restoration of the house.
This is a truly unique house that has been beautifully restored and the interiors lovingly fit the era of the house.
