The Guest farm

A guest farm, not a hotel

Lauradale sits among the vineyards of Vlottenburg, minutes from some of Stellenbosch's best-known estates Overgaauw, Neethlingshof, Vredenheim and Spier are all close by. Stellenbosch town is about ten minutes away, Cape Town International Airport twenty-five, and the V&A Waterfront roughly forty. Spend your days on the wine routes, walking in the Jonkershoek and Simonsberg reserves, or out at the valley's restaurants and farm stalls, then come back to a quiet two-hectare farm, well off the main road.

The Neighbourhood

Vlottenburg, where the

wine farms begin

Lauradale sits among the vineyards of Vlottenburg, minutes from some of Stellenbosch's best-known estates, Overgaauw, Neethlingshof, Vredenheim and Spier are all close by. Stellenbosch town is about ten minutes away, Cape Town International Airport twenty-five, and the V&A Waterfront roughly forty. Spend your days on the wine routes, walking in the Jonkershoek and Simonsberg reserves, or out at the valley's restaurants and farm stalls, then come back to a quiet two-hectare farm, well off the main road.

Lavender House at Lauradale — three-bedroom self-catering home beside the pool, Stellenbos

Not Another Hotel Story

Still run by the people who built it.

Thirty years of business hotels taught me what I didn't want to build. Lauradale is what I built instead.

For thirty years, I sold raw materials and chemicals across more than seventy countries, spending months of every year on the road. I saw a lot of the world, mostly from airports, meeting rooms, and hotel lobbies that all started to look the same.

When I retired, my wife and I wanted the opposite: somewhere slow, with good weather and real nature. South Africa was one of the few places on earth we hadn't been. A friend told us to visit Stellenbosch, I couldn't even spell it at the time.

We planned to stay two days. We stayed three weeks.

One Sunday, driving back to Cape Town along the M12, we passed a farm with a For Sale sign. We turned the car around, and within days, Lauradale was ours.

It wasn't the plan I'd imagined. The families renting the old houses moved out not long after we bought the place, and I was left standing in two empty houses and two cottages, wondering what to do next. A local guest house manager talked me into a bigger bet, build proper apartments, do it right, and in 2015, we did. I asked her to run it.

Since then, Lauradale grew from strength to strength and became a peaceful retreat for many guests. We are still improving, renovating and changing to make Lauradale the home-away-from-home for families, businessmen and couples.

What hasn't changed is the idea behind it: after all those years of hotel rooms that blurred together, I wanted guests here to feel like people, not bookings.

Come stay a while, and let us show you what that looks like.

An unhurried stay

Yours to do as little, or as much, as you like

Most of Lauradale is self-catering, so you set your own pace, cook in, fire up the braai under the vines, or head out to eat and come back whenever suits you. Every cottage and suite has air-conditioning, Wi-Fi, DSTV and a backup inverter, so load-shedding never interrupts the evening. Three-bedroom Lavender house and three apartments have solar panels that will keep the electricity going for another 3 hours during load shedding or power outages. . Rose has an inverter. Both pools are a short walk away, there's a lawn for children, and parking is secure and on the property. Pools are not fenced off and children must be supervised on the property.