And so the palace idea caught on

And so the palace idea caught on.Dad was driving us through a dust storm towards Oudtshoorn the first time I saw a feather palace Suddenly it was there, as if conjured from pure air. I stared at the fantasia of turrets, spikes, columns and twirly gables looming through the dust I loved the way the roofscape punched holes in the big sky. I'd never seen anything so alien, so grand.Dad told us the story of the feather palaces. How the ostrich barons had erected them during the height of the feather craze. How the barons had had so much money they'd run out of ways of spending it, so they'd started erecting rival palaces, each one bigger and fancier than the last.Feather palace: even the phrase seemed to have tumbled from the clouds Palace wasn't a word that fitted the Karoo. It didn't belong with mimosa thorns, goats, ostriches, drought, and sun-scrunched faces. Palace had a greener feel to it, spoke to me of velvety lands, full of princes and princesses, far away and long ago.All nine feather palaces were the handiwork of two architects: a British settler, Charles Bullock, and a Dutch immigrant, Johannes Egbertus Vixseboxse.

Each palace rested on a financial foundation of feathers, and each stood as a reminder to neighbours that the owners' ostrich wealth bound them to a finer world than the Karoo: a world of salons, promenades, balls and lustrous garden parties, where flair, sensuality, fine breeding and profligacy ruled.The walls were typically built from sandstone, cut and dressed by immigrant Scottish masons. Karoo sandstone was cheap but hardly prosaic, and Bullock and Vixseboxse turned it to brilliant advantage, so that it responded to desert textures and light. The Karoo sun gilded the walls; here, in the Jerusalem of Africa, sand, like ostriches, could be turned to gold Inside, the rooms are darkish. The architects' attempts to filter out the sun suggest a touch of cultural cringe; as if light itself were philistine and sophistication could flourish only in a European gloom.The Gormenghast roofscapes of the palaces seem to mock Oudtshoorn's tight- wrapped Calvinism and the encircling landscape's dour aridity. Some stand in solitary splendour on isolated farms; others in town, intimidating the box houses that surround them. The feather palace is a grab-bag of allusions; the ostrich barons and their architects mastered the art of the magnificent mismatch. Everything was deemed appropriate as long as it had once evoked opulence.

Baroque parapets, pyramidal turrets, gazebos and Spanish arches mingle with neo-Cape Dutch gables, cast-iron porticoes, iron lace tympanum, red Belgian fish-scale tiling and odd borrowings from the dreamlife of a Byzantine potentate.The barons did what the desert rich do everywhere, from Arizona and southern California to Mexico, Iraq and Saudi Arabia They spelled out their wealth in water It was the obvious way to flash their opulence. When nothing is as priceless as rain, tinkling water and the sheen of well-fed grass become trademark ways to announce that you've moved beyond the reach of scarcity. So each palace had its emerald spread, beyond which sprawled the parched thorn desert.AT WHAT point does optimism turn into hubris? When the rich start lighting their cigars with pounds 5 notes? When ostrich barons bathe in brandy? Such were their rumoured activities in Oudtshoorn in 1913 Fine plumes fetched pounds 500 a pound. As feather prices shot through the ceiling, land prices went soaring after them. It was easy for the barons to forget they were merely fashion farmers.

They talked of the "feather industry": a comforting phrase that gave their line of work a ring of solidity. But in haute couture sudden change is the only certainty.The 1914 Paris season brought intimations of bad news. Feather merchants, returning from overseas, reported that demand was down It had in fact been halved On 28 June that year, Europe plunged into war Shipping lines from Europe to the Cape were severed. Many of Oudtshoorn's finest markets - Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Vienna - had become inaccessible. And, in any case, calamity drove fashion far from most Europeans' minds. The world of tumbling hats prettified with feathery filigree lay at the furthest imaginable remove from a world in uniform. In Britain the Royal family used its influence to oppose flamboyant wartime dress, and banned plumes at court.So ostrich feather prices went into free fall.

Each year they lost more value, until even the finest plumes were virtually unsaleable. Even in America, where people were little touched by the war, the aura of plumes evaporated. Fashion tastes were changing for reasons more complex than wartime austerity. The First World War may have knocked the ostrich boom on the head, but it was Henry Ford and Coco Chanel who together buried it.When the first Model T appeared in 1908 it was a gleaming black novelty - a luxury, still moderately expensive That year, Ford sold 10,000.