It’s impossible to prepare for the beauty of Sterrekopje Farm. The 50-hectare estate at the foothills of the Franschhoek mountains feels plucked from the pages of a fairy tale. An hour’s drive east from the frenetic hub of Cape Town and my shoulders have started to drop. Its wild and wispy gardens overflowing with willow trees, pot-bellied piglets and plumes of lavender are balm for the soul.
It was conceived as a ‘healing farm’ by Nicole Boekhoorn and her wife and business partner, Fleur Huijskens, with the pair spending years combing the world looking for a soul-stirring property that allowed visitors to heal in nature, grounded in beauty, feminine energy and warmth. There are no diets or regimes. ‘We wanted to create more of a healing sanctuary. A lot of the high-end wellness hotels around the world always felt very sterile and left us quite cold,’ Huijskens tells me over flat whites and still-warm banana bread in the bakery.
The pair bought the then wilted 17th-century Cape Dutch estate in 2019. About 20 minutes from the famed Babylonstoren property, this storybook location is cradled by mountains and lined with immaculate vineyards, 10 minutes from the quaint town of Franschhoek, one of the oldest in South Africa. Somehow the property was overlooked by the couple until a friend’s wedding brought them to the area, creating the ‘light-bulb moment’, says Huijskens.
Together with the help of celebrated South African interior designer Grégory Mallet and landscape designer Leon Kluge, the pair brought the farm back to life. In between orchards, vegetable gardens, billowy dandelions and natural swimming holes are blouse-pink cottages and the main farmhouse. Like the outside, everything inside is layered and tactile in clashing colours and prints, ‘a bit like visiting the home of your eccentric great aunt’, explains Huijskens.
The 11 suites (known as sanctuaries) don’t play by any rules. There are big, crackling fireplaces and deep sofas. Some rooms have striped tented roofs in Indian canvas, others have giant hand-painted murals of flowers, vegetables or ornate Maharaji patterns on the walls. Fantastical Berber fabrics are draped in some rooms and grasscloth sisal wallpaper lines the corridors of the main house.
The Bathhouse is a whimsical fantasy of vaulted ceilings, floral installations and a marble hammam. There is no spa list but rather intuitive massages based on your mood and ailments. ‘We never want to be prescriptive,’ says Huijskens.
Guests may pick stays centred on rest and rituals that focus on spiritual and physical healing with daily massages, garden walks, swims, yoga classes and breath work and, if you wish, plucking medicinal herbs and plants for the meals ahead. It’s more about indulging than restricting. For every juicy heirloom salad and shakshuka made from farm fresh eggs, there are tequila-spiked green juice cocktails and decadent chocolate puddings. ‘It’s overall nourishment from soil to soul,’ explains Huijskens, and after a few days, my reality suspended, I couldn’t agree more.
