 Welcome back to Afternoon Express and it's time for Winner Home on the show today where our three talented young design contestants turned three empty apartments into dream homes at the Polo Village at Valdivia State in the Cape Winelands and the best part is that you the viewer stand a chance of winning one of the completed apartments valued at over three million rand. Now the appeal of urban living comes with beautiful design, graceful architecture and working with minimal spaces. When it comes to small spaces, careful consideration has to be given on how to utilise what you have to work with. This season of Winner Home, our designers are faced with an exactly the same challenge as they decorate apartments on the breathtaking Valdivia State in the Polo Village particularly. Now today in the loft we have urban living expert and architectural entrepreneur Jacques Van Emden, managing director at Block to give us an expert advice on small spaces and urban living. Welcome to our loft. Thanks Anita. I've asked all of our experts that have come to the space, don't you think we have the most beautiful loft in the country? It's amazing. So small spaces are a reality. Urban living is what you immerse yourself in and particularly living in cities like Cape Town where everything is on top of each other. You've got to expect to live in spaces that are sort of crammed in together. What does this mean and what is urban living and why is it such a big appeal? So for me urban living, it really starts with that we actually look at our cities differently. We want to interact with your city. It's no longer a thing that's different to you and you don't get involved with. You want to be involved with the public spaces, with all the retail, with all the experiences that cities have to offer. So you live in the city which is something that's been quite a big change and I love the active citizenship of people taking back their cities and wanting to be involved in what the spaces are around them, the parks, the public spaces. I mean I feel personally like the mountains partly mine and the oceans partly mine and I think that's what urban living is about and an urban home for me is it's so much about saying there's a new type of home that has to exist in this new living in this new urban living context and a lot of that home is we always say four walls makes an apartment but it doesn't make a home. A home is all those little pieces in between, it's the intangible things that go in there so we've got to really focus as people involved in making cities and making urban spaces, we've got to focus on making brilliant launch pads to live from and to still feel homely in. Yeah but then coming with that I mean when a spot becomes particularly popular a lot of people move in and the spaces get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and sometimes it might feel like you're not in home, it might always feel like you're in a box apartment all the time but there are ways I think to avoid that. How can we turn small spaces into beautiful places that we want to live in? I think it's a key challenge and I don't think it's anything local, it's actually the world's going through this, urbanisation is pushing people to live in cities, it's across all the income ranges, there's a space pressure and I think one of the beautiful parts of it for me is that design is a big part of the solution which is fantastic. So for us at Block we focus heavily on what we call duality of use and third spaces. If you've got half of what you had to work with it's got to work harder, you've got to make every square metre you know punch above its weight it's got to be able to do two things. So it's really the meeting of innovation, technology and design kind of coming together to push what we did previously in Challenge Convention. Yeah so I'm big on the sort of business side of things and I'm always keen to rack people's brains around this because everyone said that if you're looking to buy property invest in spaces that are obviously either growing or you spotting trends and where they're going and it seems that urban areas and urban living is very popular. Property is quite expensive there, why is it so expensive? I think it's demand, it's a lifestyle that you want to buy into so as more and more people kind of you don't longer buy just the box or just the home or just the apartment, you actually buy the neighbourhood, you buy the community and it almost becomes self-fulfilling because more active people that want to move into a place they make it even nicer. So as more and more people like make an effort and put the effort in, it's obviously going to drive demand. And in those areas as you said it's getting smaller and smaller so once your demand's pushing up and it's getting more exciting to live there it almost self fuels itself so it can be quite intimidating. And that's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to sell property too. Absolutely. Can you prepare like give us some advice on preparing a piece of property to make it even more valuable in a spot that's rising in fame? I think we like to start everything on empathy so we really think about how people live in homes. I think under the space pressure you want to, we still South African just because we live in an apartment. You want to brine our vulgarities, you know? We want to have friends over, we want to entertain, we want to be social, you still have a pride in your home. So we really start to look at from an empathetic viewpoint we look at how people live in our homes. What do they want to do? Do they want a little bar? Do they need a study to work from at home? Maybe they're a student. What are their aspirations for each building that we look at or each apartment we look at? So I think for us your first point is empathy and then you have to jump into design. Design transcends economics. You can have brilliant design. You might have a beautiful floor finish like here or you might just be a raw concrete finish because that's all you can afford at that point in time. But the design of the space will transcend the finish, will transcend time. So for us we really, it's empathy and design coming together. This is great advice and I think it's triggering a lot for me about when I met our contestants and we're really drilling them on the idea of building in Valdivia. I think they've got this idea in the head of what a beautiful property should look like but it's got to fit into the location that it's going into, who's going to live in that property. So Valdivia is obviously a beautiful estate to live in. The Polo Village is a beautiful spot within Valdivia. What are our contestants meant to be looking for in that space particularly? Because those are not massive apartments but they are beautifully spaced. I think you've got to start with challenging convention. If you're under space pressure and you try to do what we did, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago, it's not going to work anymore just because you only have so much space to work. Shea's launch won't quite fit me. So you've got to actually kind of, whether it's through furniture, whether it's how spaces connect, whether it's through detailing or making a passage, also a dressing room, whatever you can do, you've got a really challenged convention. And I think that's where you see people being incredibly successful and that's really what the designers or any designer is going to have to do in a space today. That's really, really small. I mean, people are obviously all the ways looking to invest in property. And I've been on to Private Properties' website and it is so incredible because there's so much on offer and they give you a lot of great advice in terms of looking for the right thing. But it is still intimidating because everybody that's putting something on the site is also trying to sell that thing to you. So what do you look for when you go into a site like Private Property and looking for that perfect investment home or maybe you're just looking to sell an investment home? I mean, I absolutely love Private Property. It's got some amazing functions where if you really get involved into the functionality, it can start to work for you through the notifications, through the alerts. And I want to encourage anybody that's buying or selling, you want to let the website work for you. It's an unbelievable user tool. So that's the first thing for me. And in terms of when you're looking to sell, you know, pictures always tell a thousand words. But I think for us, it's really about brilliant communication. You've got a small platform to communicate something. So it's more about being concise and leaving the user that's reading your whatever you're trying to sell, giving them something a bit more memorable to look at. Jacques, I hope that our contestants are watching this closely because that was some incredible advice packed up into a short little interview. So I appreciate your time on the show. I'm looking forward to seeing how you watch this project unfold and get your input towards the end. I'm excited to watch it as well. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jacques. It's so exciting because every day here in Afternoon Express, we step into the world of exquisite interior design with Winner Home. And you'll see the national talent as well as the contestants transform empty properties at the Valdivia State in the Cape Winans into dream homes using those finishes provided by Caesar Stone as well as Plaskon. Now, if you want a chance to win one of those finished apartments, which are valued at over a 3 million rand, go to privateproperty.co.za to enter the grand prize competition. Winner Home is proudly brought to you by Private Property in association with NetBank. Now, after the break, I finally performs live right here in the loft. I finally have money.