It could be the set of a left-wing Sixties drama. Chartreuse curtains at the patio doors, a Picasso print, a Shona sculpture, a futuristic Harmony sofa with a dozen pillows.
But there's a heaviness to the elegance of the room which would soon be trashed by police in a frenzied attack - the pictures slashed, the African masks broken and the drums shattered.
Unlikely revolutionary Arthur Goldreich sits on a chair behind the couch, his head to one side, his neat sideburns and beard a dead giveaway. It's impossible to know his thoughts as he watches the police gather solemnly in their overcoats a few paces away. The game is well and truly up.
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The image - a vivid tableau of white men against white - is in the collection from the notorious police raid on Liliesleaf Farm on July 11 1963. It has all the emotional weight of a truncheon on the neck, representing a key moment in the drama as Umkhonto weSizwe's first high command was finally captured, the sophisticated master-servant charade of the farm in tatters.
The urbane group of men who occupied Liliesleaf in the 1960s wouldn't always have discussed politics in the lounge of the manor house. There might have been conversations about other things, such as the suicide of the American poet Sylvia Plath, France's underground nuclear testing or the extraordinary strike that collapsed newspaper publishing in New York for more than 100 days.
The detail of many of the memories is still unfolding, as more and more stories emerge about this seminal moment in the liberation struggle. These tales, together with the remarkable pictures taken by police in that fateful year, will soon entrance visitors at the Liliesleaf Museum and Liberation Centre in Rivonia.
An ambitious, expensive project of interactive tables, tranquil walkways and narration, it is being driven "by the gut" of Nicholas Wolpe, the director of the Liliesleaf Trust, who was one of a group of friends who first started talking about transforming the site into a museum over breakfast in 2001.
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