Review: Queen Victoria Hotel, Cape Town

Slink into this seductive Cape Town boutique hotel to start your South African getaway in style. The 35-room Queen Victoria sits amid a cluster of Colonial buildings on a tiny hill above the bustling V&A Waterfront. The hotel exudes an air of tranquillity, yet tumble out of bed and down a few steps, and you’re in one of the city’s liveliest areas, with bars, restaurants, shops, yacht-filled harbours and the Robben Island ferry.

From the moment you step inside the hotel’s soaring white-marble lobby, you’re enveloped in a world of discreet sophistication. Walking past a 250-year-old bonsai tree, you ascend to the guestroom floors via a glass lift or, more dramatically, the pearlescent spiral Corian and marble staircase. On the landings, you pass nature-themed works by South Africa’s leading contemporary artists - a giant butterfly painting, a bronze panther sculpture, a macro-zoomed orchid photo.

Guestrooms are jewel-box glamorous, with soft-hued and shimmering taupes, silvers and lilacs, boudoir-style mirrors and a wood-cut print of a dreamy-eyed young Queen Victoria on the wall. Open the curtains for views of the Waterfront and the Atlantic on one side of the hotel, or Table Mountain on the other.

Downstairs in the hotel’s moody royal-purple cocktail bar, join fashionable locals – architects, designers, photographers - for glasses of Pinotage or Chenin Blanc from the nearby winelands, then mooch over to the other side of the fireplace for dinner in the 40-seat restaurant, Dash. The next day, lounge around the hedge-lined pool or head along the coast on one of the world’s most dramatic drives to Cape Point.

DON'T MISS

Dinner in the intimate Dash restaurant is one of the city’s finest and most romantic. The French-Capetonian menu changes seasonally, but when available, order the indigenous kingklip fish, springbok antelope or fynbos vegetables – an exquisite taste of South Africa. FLIGHT TIME

12 hours GO

British Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com) flies direct from London Heathrow to Cape Town from £717 return. Doubles at Queen Victoria (Portswood Close, Portswood Ridge, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town; +27 21 418 1466, www.newmarkhotels.com) from £255, B&B.