The village in the Mother City

‘It’s not a hotel, nor a house nor a pub. It is instead a sort of oddballs club.’

It’s not every boutique escape that has a poem — this is just one line of a dozen — as mantra, motto and marketing brochure. But the Dorp Hotel in Cape Town isn’t your everyday hotel. And as the poem, penned by the late owner Gail Behr, suggests, it’s impossible to put the Dorp Hotel into a neat box.

Set high on a hillside at the top of the colourful Cape Town neighbourhood of the Bo-Kaap, Dorp is, of course, a hotel in that it has luxurious rooms with comfortable beds swathed in fine linen. But there are no loyalty cards or room categories here. Anodyne décor? Forget about it. Instead, individually decorated rooms range from vast suites with private balconies to a tiny space gleefully sold as the “worst room in the house”. And guests love it. Character and charm are the only standard inclusion.

The original hotel offers an eclectic collection of 30 rooms, arranged into separate wings each imbued with their own character. To reach them you’ll wander gravel paths through a secret garden of fynbos borders, citrus trees and wild olives laid out by landscape designer Leon Kluge.

So where to stay? The Arcadia wing has a grand Georgian appeal, while the intimate rooms of the Rose wing boast some of the best city views in a hotel that’s not short on vistas. My favourite? The Noon Greenhouse suite is a riot of colour, with wraparound steel windows and a broad stoep offering an eyrie of foliage and fine views from which to contemplate the city below.

So in many ways it is very much something of an oddballs club. Behr was beloved for her creative vision and unique sense of style, and her hotel defies easy description. The solution, really, is to visit.

‘You’ll know if you fit the moment you arrive,’ the poem continues. ‘And if you don’t, simply reverse down the drive’

But there is, I’d wager, little chance of that happening.