Babylonstoren

The place

Babylonstoren is one of the oldest Cape Dutch farms in the Franschhoek valley, its land grant dating to 1692, its werf of whitewashed gabled buildings preserved rather than restyled. Karen Roos, a former magazine editor, took it on in 2007 and built the garden that now defines it: three and a half hectares laid out in the geometry of the Company's Garden that fed passing ships in seventeenth-century Cape Town. Three hundred kinds of plant, almost all of them edible or medicinal, run in clipped avenues of quince and pomegranate, prickly pear and bee-fed borage. The garden is not a backdrop to the hotel. It is the reason the hotel exists.

The rooms

The accommodation is a cluster of farm cottages and Fynbos Family Cottages set among the orchards, each one a restored or rebuilt Cape farmstead with a wood stove, a fireplace and a view that ends at the Simonsberg. There is no resort corridor, no atrium. You stay in the farm, not beside it. The newer Fynbos houses sit slightly apart in indigenous planting for guests who want more distance. The light at six in the morning, coming off the mountain across the dam, is the thing people remember.

The table

Babel, the farm restaurant, works the garden directly: the kitchen cooks what was picked that morning, plated by colour, red dishes, green dishes, white dishes, in a converted cowshed. The Greenhouse does long garden lunches; the Bakery runs on the farm's own stoneground flour; and the tasting room pours the estate's wines, with the Chenin Blanc and the Babel red the ones to start on. None of it is imported theatre. The supply chain is a two-minute walk.

The day

A morning garden walk with one of the gardeners is the orientation everything else hangs off: you learn what is ripe, and you eat it for the rest of the day. The Garden Spa is built half underground beneath a green roof, with a hammam and a long indoor pool. Beyond the werf there is the Healing Garden, the Puff Adder stream walk, cycling between the vineyards, and a cellar tour for those who want the wine in detail. Two unhurried days is the right length. Three if the spa is the point.

At a glance

Setting

Cape Dutch wine and fruit farm, 1692 land grant

Rooms

Restored farm cottages + Fynbos Family Cottages

The draw

3.5-hectare formal edible garden; Babel restaurant; Garden Spa

Wine

Estate Chenin Blanc, Babel red, Mourvedre rose

Best months

September to April (Cape spring and summer)

Getting there

45 minutes from Cape Town International

Rates

On application; cottages book months ahead in high season

The TGC view

Babylonstoren is the clearest example in the Cape of a place that earns its standing through one coherent idea, carried all the way through. The garden feeds the kitchen, the kitchen explains the garden, and the wine grows in the same soil. We place it for guests who want the Winelands without a golf-resort frame, and pair it with the Franschhoek estates and the Cape Town coast on either side. TGC arranges the cottages, the garden and cellar access, transfers from the city, and the table at Babel that is otherwise the hardest part.

Want us to arrange it?

We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.