Koopmans-De Wet House

This guide to the Koopmans-De Wet House in Cape Town opens in the music room, where a fireplace medallion that looks like carved marble turns out to be paint, part of trompe l'oeil murals an unnamed artist added to this Strand Street townhouse in the late 1700s. It traces how later paint and plaster buried the illusion for nearly two centuries, until restorers rediscovered it in the 1970s using notes an earlier conservator had left behind. You'll also hear about Marie Koopmans-de Wet, widowed in 1879, and the Strand Street salon she built inside these same rooms.