Babylonstoren

Babylonstoren is a wine and fruit farm granted in 1692, bought in 2007 by Karen Roos, once editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, and her husband Koos Bekker. They asked the French garden architect Patrice Taravella to lay out a formal fruit and vegetable garden of some three hectares in front of the old manor house, and opened the farm hotel in November 2010. Everything here turns on that garden. It has more than 300 edible plant varieties, a prickly pear maze, a clivia walk and a stream running through it, and the kitchens at Babel and the Greenhouse cook from what it grows.

The rooms are in whitewashed cottages with gables and fireplaces, rebuilt on the footprints of the old labourers' houses beside the garden, each with a glass cube kitchen extension. The Fynbos Cottages sit further out, beyond the dam among vineyards and orchards, and one farmhouse is reserved for adults. Bicycles and swimming in the farm dam are included.

The farm runs on borehole water and a solar field of 528 panels, and the spa opens onto the trees, with a hammam, a salt room and a heated indoor pool. In the evening, once the day visitors have gone, the garden falls quiet and belongs to those who are staying the night.