Michael Chandler: Ceramics and Murals in Bo-Kaap

Art

Michael Chandler still paints every tile himself, even the ones destined for hotel walls thousands of miles from Bo-Kaap.

Author

Tom Clark

Photography

Tom Clark / Micha Weinberger

Walk up the stairs to Chandler House on Church Street in Bo-Kaap and you get a bit of a scolding on the way. Tiled onto the balustrade beside the steps, in blue and white, is a line from William Morris: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. The steps themselves take the advice literally, a mosaic made entirely of broken blue and white plates. Michael Chandler laid it himself.

Inside, the ground floor is part shop, part gallery, stacked with work by a rotating group of Cape Town makers he has picked to keep him company. Nothing about it feels staged. It looks like a room a collector has been slowly filling for years because he genuinely likes the things in it.

Then he takes you upstairs, which is where things get interesting.

Cult Gaia Mural - Michael Chandler - Design Safaris

"Then he takes you upstairs, which is where things get interesting."

Upstairs is where the real work happens, tables covered in tiles too big to fit anywhere downstairs. Michael sketches the pattern first, then paints it tile by tile, cobalt on white, the same technique whether it is a small commission or a wall the size of a shop front. In 2023 that wall was the facade of the Cult Gaia store in Miami's Design District. In 2024 it was inside Coccinella, the Italian restaurant at Royal Mansour Tamuda Bay in Morocco, painted here and shipped over in pieces. His work has also hung in the Iziko South African National Gallery and travelled as far as the Grand Palais in Paris, though he is not the type to bring that up unprompted.

What sticks with visitors is seeing it half finished. A single tile does not look like much, but a table covered in dozens of them, each one part of a picture headed for a wall thousands of kilometres away, is a different story. Guests on our Creative Cape Town Tour get to see that stage, before the mural becomes a photo in a hotel brochure.

Michael is also a storyteller, and not a background one. Ask him about a single tile and the story rarely stays there. It drifts into Greek mythology, then Cape history, then whatever the stars were doing the week he started painting. He does not explain his work so much as tell you where it came from, and the answer is never simple.

Everything else stays as is. Let me know if you want the quote field moved to pull from this new bit instead, "he does not explain his work so much as tell you where it came from" could work well there too.

Chandler House is one stop on our Creative Cape Town Tour, and it is the one guests bring up again afterwards. The shop is good on its own, but what people remember is what happens next. Michael actually lets you upstairs, into the part of his work nobody photographs for a magazine: tiles half painted, paint still wet, sketches pinned up that may or may not survive the final version.

We keep the groups small so there is time to actually talk to him rather than just look at his work from a distance. If you want to see where a porcelain mural starts before it ends up on a wall in Miami or Morocco, enquire and we will build it into your day in Cape Town.

Tom Clark is the co-founder of Design Safaris, a Cape Town-based company offering private curated tours focused on art, architecture, design, and cuisine.

Chandler House: Link