One of the hideaways featured in our Perfect Hideaways in South Africa coffee table Book 2, Palm House is a showstopper.
There’s always luxury in a decorating style that rates over-scaled dimensions as one of its key elements. Palm House, an Englishman-in-Africa-style country house in Constantia, has it in bucket loads.
Perhaps it’s the planters housing the banana trees – not just any banana trees, but enormous ones whose branches soar up to ceilings held aloft by gnarled, white-painted beams. They’re unexpected, as are the overly deep sofas and the sense of theatre that pervades the entire interior.
This self-catering luxury accommodation is a showstopper. Its interiors are the kinds that inspire decorators. The rooms are big and high and filled with light. This is high-octane, laidback African living, chic yet practical, comfortable yet perfectly poised in that tradition of European rooms that embrace the need for ceremonial and formality when they’re called for.
As a private holiday home to rent, Palm House is a Homeaway from home kind of place that makes you feel comfortable – whether you’re a former state president invited for dinner, a daughter’s surfing friends invited for a weekend getaway, or overseas visitors enjoying a family holiday.
Palm House is an easy place to entertain in, but if you need to be alone, the bedroom suites are secluded and private.
White-painted floors, creamy linen, crewel work curtains, antique furniture inlaid with ivory and tortoiseshell, painted screens, huge wicker baskets, heaps of books, towers of blue and white ceramics, those potted banana trees reaching up to the ceilings: Palm House is simple and handsome. Downstairs an enfilade of big, wide rooms unites the sitting room with, on one side, the kitchen-dining room. Cook and entertain your friends all at once.
Inside-outside living for every season
On the other side is a library-cum-gin-bar, which in turn leads out to the Africa Room where, if it weren’t for the ceiling overhead, you’d be sitting in the open air. South African houses have mastered the art of conjuring living spaces that underpin the excitement of inside-outside living and the Africa Room exemplifies this perfectly.
In fact, it’s a classic stoep room – open on two sides, its walls penetrated by deep arches and, cool and shaded in the summer, in the winter the chill is taken off the air because the third side consists of a vast fireplace.
Deep linen-covered sofas and armchairs, rugs and animal trophies complete a look that you find mimicked across Southern Africa. It overlooks the garden with its rectangular pool and in the distance, on the other side of the Constantia Valley, is the chain of mountains that snake down the Cape Peninsula from Table Mountain to the sea at Cape Point.
Upstairs in the main block is a single-bedroom suite: off the landing, the bedroom, a dressing room and a bathroom – oh and to make this unique holiday home even more fabulous, there’s the al fresco bathroom too which allows you to bathe outdoors, on the roof, under the stars, shaded by the surrounding oaks and in full view of the handsome mountain range that makes the Cape Peninsula so extraordinary.
In another wing are two further bedrooms and their bathrooms, both of them opening to the garden, which is secluded, private, and sheltered from everything but the hot summer sun.
Edited by Dawn Kennedy