The whole estate
Somewhere cool to be in July.
Cape Town's seasons run opposite to yours. When Dubai and Riyadh are at their least habitable and southern Europe has emptied itself into the sea, the mountain behind this house is the greenest it gets all year, the days sit in the high teens, and the city belongs to the people who live in it. You are not moving to a different summer. You are stepping out of one.
What you take
Everything. All three houses, the full ten thousand square metres, and nothing shared with anybody. The Main House sleeps seven across three bedrooms and holds the kitchen, the long table, the fireplace and the piano. The Guest Cottage and the Writers Cottage sleep two apiece, each with its own door, its own kitchen and its own quiet — which is the arrangement that matters when you are travelling with grown children, with parents, or with staff of your own. Eleven people, together, and nobody on top of anybody.
It comes staffed
Richard and Emilia live on the estate and have run this house for years; Tiwonge works alongside them five days a week. Fires are laid before you come outside, laundry is taken off your hands, and eggs from the hens arrive at the door with whatever the garden is giving. A caterer can be arranged for dinner at the long table, billed separately. Nobody hovers, and if you would rather have the place entirely to yourselves, the household keeps its distance.
The household →Behind a gate
The estate sits at the top of a private road on the slope of Skoorsteenberg, behind its own gate, twenty-five minutes from central Cape Town and feeling twice that far. Nothing passes through. The only people on the property are the ones you arrived with and the household, and two of them sleep here.
Winter here, honestly
Cape Town in July is not a beach holiday and we would rather say so than have you discover it. It rains, sometimes for two days together, and then it clears and the mountain is green in a way it never is in February. The house was built for exactly this. There is a fire lit in the living room before you come downstairs and another in the herb garden at dusk. There is a wood-fired sauna and an open-air cold plunge in a quiet corner of the estate. The twenty-metre lap pool is mountain water and in winter it is bracing — that is what the sauna is for. And there is enough glass in this house that weather becomes something you watch rather than something that happens to you.
Nothing depends on the grid
Water comes from a borehole eighty-two metres into the mountain and every tap in the house is drinking water, lab-tested. Power comes from twelve kilowatts of solar and a battery bank big enough to carry the property through the night, which matters in a country that still loses its electricity for hours at a time — inside the house, the lights do not blink. There is fibre. For a family that travels with work still attached, it is worth knowing that none of it is theoretical.
How the house runs itself →You arrive with the day intact
Cape Town keeps the same clock as central Europe through the northern summer and sits an hour or two behind the Gulf. You land in the morning having lost nothing — no days written off to the wrong side of a time zone, which is the quiet reason this works for a two-week stay and not only a long one. There are direct flights from the Gulf and from Europe; your advisor will have the current schedule.
Taking it
The whole estate is arranged by the week rather than by the night, and the calendar on the booking page shows what is open across all three houses at once. Tell us your dates and who is coming, and we will come back with a firm total and terms — usually the same day.
See what is open, or write to us directly. We work with a small number of agents and advisors; if you are placing a client, say so and we will deal with you on those terms.