One of Cape Town’s most closely guarded secrets is the existence of little Beta Beach at Bakoven. Surrounded by clapboard bungalows, and with just one or two access points, it’s utterly idyllic. Happily for its owners, Beta Beach cottage overlooks it, the view filled with a bright, white, gently sloping sandy beach, the massive boulders that characterise this stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard and, well, on a hot day, the neighbours dogs, a couple of mooching lovers and low-swooping seagulls playing in the breeze. You may also catch a fisherman here in the evening hoping to get lucky with whatever’s swimming past in the frigid Atlantic.
Bakoven is a like a small village, and this house is typical of the area and, like it’s neighbours, it’s a cream-painted, clapboard cottage characterized by a pitched roof and louvered shutters over the windows. A narrow lane leads down to it from the car parking area and all around, there’s bougainvillea, low-hanging milkwood trees, ancient cape olives luscious with fruit, young frondy palms and literally buckets of indigenous flowering fynbos planted there to withstand the Cape’s seaside climate. If you want the quintessential Cape cottage, this is it.
The three-bedroom, three bathroom house is on two levels, and you enter it via a large living room which, with a kitchen at one end, is punctuated at the other by a sea-facing balcony that clearly, come summer, is Beta Beach’s social HQ. A large eight-seater dining table is centre stage, and at lunches or dinners it provides ringside seats from which to observe whatever’s happening on the beach below, a few feet away. To one side a flight of steps leads down to a private courtyard at beach level, onto which open two en suite bedrooms and a TV sitting room and, best of all, there’s a little private gate that leads down to the beach itself.
If you want beachside living in peace and silence, this is the place for you.
