Before Peter Rich's small company won the World Building of the Year award last month, it didn't even have a website.
Since then, it's had more than two million hits.
Peter Rich Architects, an eight-strong team, received the top award at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, where the world's leading architects are reviewed and celebrated by their peers.
There were 640 entrants from 67 countries in competition, and while Rich was thrilled when the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in Limpopo won the Cultural Building of the Year award, he was "completely overwhelmed" when it won the top prize.
"We've won many awards, but it makes a big difference to win the 'Oscar'. We've been run off our feet, so I've had to be quite discriminating with my time since this amazing honour," he says.
Rich was up against many impressive projects like the redevelopment of Father Duffy Square in New York and the Bras Basah Mass Rapid Transit Station in Singapore, but in the end the jury found that the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre - commissioned by SANParks - was the most architecturally and psychologically powerful project of all.
"It carries both weight and a message of complexity to the outside world," commented chairman of the World Architecture Community, Suha Ozkan.
To that, Rich adds simply: "We built a building that is wonderfully authentic, made from the earth and with the help of the local community. That is its power."
Observers have remarked that the building looks like a seed that simply grew there.
It's a perfect Highveld summer's day and we're sitting at the top of Rich's steep garden overlooking his brightly coloured Ndebele-inspired home-cum-office in Parktown.
He has just returned from Axum in Ethiopia where he and his team are "masterplanning" this ancient city after winning a tender geared to enhance its tourism appeal.
He has been doing a similar project since last year in Kigali, Rwanda, in between donning his professor's hat to teach a younger generation of architects and urban planners.
An avid researcher of indigenous tribes and a leading proponent of contemporary African architecture, Rich likes to build on tradition and his buildings resonate strongly in the communities where they stand.
One of his most notable local works is the Alexandra Interpretation Centre, which he says is loved and embraced by the community.
"My inspiration comes from the particular cultural context I've been commissioned to work in, mostly African, which I then interpret in the architecture.
"Africans actually have all the solutions, but they tend to be mesmerised by the BMW showroom. The Ndebele woman is just as talented at architecture as someone trained by Palladio (Italian Renaissance architect), simply because she is practised in design and building. You are only as good as how much you practise your craft," he says.
With a career spanning 40 years, Rich has an impressive body of work behind him that includes national buildings as well as humble community facilities in Gauteng and Limpopo.
He likes to describe his buildings as "devoid of style or fashion", but a "respectful treatment of ethnicity" that rings true to the people they are for.
And this was exactly what he had in mind when he stood on the dry, unremarkable ridge overlooking what is now the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre.
Located at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers where the borders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana meet, the centre serves as the tourist's introduction to the Mapungubwe National Park, the site of an ancient civilisation linked to the Great Zimbabwe trading culture and where the famous golden rhino figurine was discovered.
The centre, which took three years from planning to construction to complete, comprises two hollow cairns, while timbrel vaulting was used to construct the billowing forms that expose the arched edges of their thin shells, an analogy of the archeological revelation of the area's past culture.
The timbrel vaulting was overseen by the contract engineers, a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who have been studying vaulting, an ancient building technology that was used before the advent of reinforced concrete, whereby you use hyperbolic paraboloid geometry (a potato crisp shape) as a design.
Timbrel vaulting doesn't rely on gravity, but on the adhesion of several layers of overlapping tiles that are woven together. In this case the tiles were 18mm thick and handmade from local soil.
Says Rich: "This old-fashioned method of construction also has a low carbon footprint, which is why architects are looking at it again."
Inside, there are zig-zagging walkways through the complex. The internal exhibition space is cavernous, with light filtered through coloured glass, with dappled patterns reflected from the ponds that cool the air ventilating the buildings.
Light is also cleverly tempered with rusted steel screens and slatted timber.
The domed exteriors are covered with loose rubble stones cleared from the site before building.
"The building symbolises Africa before colonisation, its ancient cultures and mythologies. It's designed to evoke the qualities of a sacred ruin, layered with meaning and richness. The feeling I wanted to inspire was of a mystical, sacred place, a place that tells the story of Africa," Rich says.
The fact that Rich and his team made such resourceful use of local material and labour left a strong impression on the sustainability agenda at the architecture festival, although the emphasis in his 10-minute presentation remained firmly on the centre's cultural contribution.
"I told a lyrical, human story, not a windgat story about what a genius I am, and people just delighted in that," he says.
The significance of Rich's win for South Africa has perhaps yet to be felt.
"To date, contemporary South African architecture hasn't been recognised by the rest of the world," Rich says, "but the recently launched book 10+ years 100+ buildings - Architecture in a democratic South Africa, by Professor Ora Joubert, topped by this victory, will hopefully put us on the map, so to speak.
"As architects we are wrestling with what makes us special in this place, in the 21st century, how we interpret it and make it personal.
"We have the chance now to make public spaces that really reflect our cultural diversity, and bring African technology, like the vaulting we used on the Mapungubwe project, back to Africa," he says.
This legacy has already begun, it seems. In Mapungubwe, the unemployed masons trained on site by Rich and company are using the remaining tiles from the project for their houses in nearby villages.
And so they continue a wonderful South African success story.