Hotel Interior Designers set about creating a sense of theatre in an hotel; drama in the interiors. Often this is undermined by the hotel operator who fails to train staff properly or who fails to maintain the interiors as the designers conceived them - simple things like using the wrong wattage of lamp can totally ruin the ambience the designer has created.
Bushmans Kloof is the opposite. Here, the operator makes the sense of theatre build from the moment you start your journey to the hotel. It is reinforced by the way in which the guest is ‘managed’, and reinforced again by the design and operation of the rooms and public spaces.
Arrival is best done by car (although there is a Bushmans Kloof International Airport - a shack on a dirt strip - or a helipad), with the last 46 kilometres being over unmade tracks across mountains and bush. The last eight kilometres are after passing through an electronically controlled security gate; guests are told to ring on leaving the nearest town (Clanwilliam), some fifty kilometres away, as there is no rescue service or cell phone reception in the mountains.
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Traditional materials used in a contemporary way, with accent colour via the red vases, gives an African style
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"the operator makes the sense of theatre build from the moment you start your journey to the hotel"
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Reflecting pool in front of the 'public areas' - click to see one of the swimming pools
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Koro Lodge sleeps up to eight in seclusion with its own housekeeper, bar, kitchen and ranger. As we drove up, my driver apologised "Eland ate the garden yesterday"...
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Exterior of a suite - click to see the whole hotel
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Ringing the hotel will let them estimate your time on the journey so that they know whether to send out a rescue party. I suspect that this is the first piece of theatre, creating the expectation of isolation in the bush and giving a delicious edge of delightful anticipation of danger to the drive. As you arrive to the entrance of the hotel, the electronic gate takes you onto another 8 kilometres dusty drive reaching the low rise buildings gleaming white in the sun under their thatched roofs. This is vernacular architecture at one with the spectacular mountain landscape your drive has taken you through, a green oasis of lawns making for a theatrical presentation of the buildings.
There are sixteen rooms, mostly suites, plus a lodge (Koro Lodge) which sleeps groups of up to eight. Each suite is contained in a low building, sometimes two to a building, all carefully sited in an arc facing the mountains and a small lake – an invitation to take a seat on the terrace to watch for wild and bird life. Bushmans is of course a game reserve and eco hotel where the owners have created a breeding herd of the Cape Mountain Zebra (there is more than one brand of zebra, you see) and have created a wildlife reserve that now sends breeding stock to other reserves around Africa.
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Bushmans Kloof
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