Louis Karol looks like Tevye - without a beard - in Fiddler on the Roof as he stands in his reception area, rotund, ebullient, arms out wide and welcoming.
"Remember that little village we designed for you?" he calls out.
Karol (79) has headed his eponymous architecture, engineering and interior design firm for 55 years. But there's nothing stuffy about the thoroughly modern interior of his offices in a trendily renovated, 19th-century factory. It probably remains the most successful such practice in SA, and one of its biggest.
HOW HE CHILLS
 He doesn't
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Karol's only concession to age is a readiness to reminisce. Suits me.
It's no surprise that one thread runs through his career. He arrived from Lithuania in 1936, the youngest child, at eight, of a strictly orthodox Jewish family - and retains his strict orthodoxy.
So why did he become an architect? "Most companies in those days worked on Saturdays, my Sabbath," he says. "Only architects didn't, so I became one."
Why, in a profession where networking at lunches and conferences is everything, does he stick purely to business?
"When I started business there was nowhere you could get a kosher steak," he says. So he spent all his time building up his business by doing what he loved: working very hard.
"We developed a reputation for being briefed by a client one day, working through the night and producing concepts and plans the next," says Karol. "And you'll find the architects who've joined this practice are, like me, hard workers with few social interests."
Karol points to three milestone projects his firm designed, all in Cape Town. In the mid-1960s, Mobil House in Long Street was his first modern commercial building. "People who were building houses stopped coming to me because they thought I was too big," he recalls.
In the early 1970s, Des Baker of builders Murray & Roberts asked him to propose a new project on Golden Acre for Sanlam. "The planners had massacred Cape Town and this was our opportunity to put a new heart into the city," he says. "Golden Acre connected the station with the city centre.
"It has never been redesigned and never had an empty shop.
"We finished on time, on budget."
Clearly, the culmination of Karol's career was the V&A Waterfront. "[Then V&A CEO] David Jack took me on as retail consultant at a fee of R5 000 that he has never paid me," he says. "You could see the hand of God in that project. Who would appoint a planner as CEO and an academic [UCT economics professor Brian Kantor] as chairman? But it worked... you'd come up with an idea and - whap - it was implemented.
"We didn't know what to do with Victoria Wharf. Then I remembered a few years before the Sea Point shul got a new rabbi. It was Rosh Hashanah [Jewish New Year] and he had to send his wife and daughters all the way to Claremont to buy new dresses. I thought: Why don't we let them shop at Victoria Wharf?' That gave V&A critical mass. And it saved Cape Town."
There's no talk of slowing down but son Eitan and daughter Simone are partners in the firm. Simone is black, adopted by Karol and wife Sonia in the 1970s. Educated at posh Herschel School, she's as dedicated to orthodoxy as he is. And she brings a special bonus. Together with other black architects she controls 50% of the firm, giving Karol a top-rated black economic empowerment business that's still in the family.
But the firm will keep the name Louis Karol. Through many partnerships in the past, it has been like that - and it's unlikely even to become Karol & Karol.
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