Seychellois Creole House

The Seychellois Creole house is the traditional timber dwelling of the Seychelles. It is defined by a high-pitched roof, a large verandah or balcony with wooden balustrades, big double doors and windows, and a raised base of stone. Once common across the islands, it has become rare: an estimated 95% of such buildings are no longer standing.

Origins

According to the historian Tony Mathiot, the first traditional Creole structures were designed and built by some of about 70 French Jacobins exiled to Mahe for allegedly plotting against Napoleon; the deportees arrived in 1801. The house type is attributed to French settlers from Ile Bourbon (Reunion) and developed through the 19th century.

Roof

• Form: a high-pitched roof that, with large openings, gave natural ventilation and light. Some houses had small vertical windows in projecting gables.
• Thatch: early roofs were thatched with pandanus leaves. A landslide in Victoria on 12 October 1862 washed away many thatched houses.
• Corrugated iron: the Building Ordinance of 2 August 1902 restricted thatch in Victoria, after which builders there used corrugated iron sheets. Thatch was out of fashion by about 1910, though it continued in suburbs and rural districts.
• Structure: a ridge pole of capucin and rafters of bodamyen, with hand-hewn casuarina beams joined by mortise and tenon.

Walls, floors and plan

Frames and boards used tropical hardwoods including capucin, bois rouge, albizzia, takamaka and kalis dipap. Houses rest on masonry plinths, or in the 19th century sometimes on four stone piles or concrete pillars, with steps of coral limestone. A verandah with raffia blinds and a loft or garret were standard, and the kitchen was a separate outbuilding with a stone-flagged floor. Plantation houses had living rooms with up to ten pairs of double doors and windows. Coral lime, once used in masonry, is no longer used, partly to protect reefs.

Decline and conservation

Many Creole houses were still lived in during the 1960s, but most were demolished after independence, and virtually no new traditional Creole buildings have been built since the 1970s. The Seychelles Heritage Foundation works on their preservation. Surviving examples include Kenwyn House in Victoria (1855), a declared National Monument renovated in 2003; the Grann Kaz on L'Union Estate, La Digue, restored in the late 1970s; and the restored town house Kaz Zanana in Victoria.