If Cape Dutch is the architecture of the farm, Victorian is the architecture of the boom. Diamonds, gold, wool and ostrich feathers paid for it: streets of villas with cast-iron verandas, bay windows, sash windows and corrugated iron roofs, run up in the last decades of the nineteenth century wherever the money landed. Cape Town’s City Bowl and southern suburbs filled with them, and so did the wool and feather towns of the Karoo, where whole streetscapes survive intact.
A century and a half later, the survivors make superb places to stay: high ceilings, generous proportions, gardens designed for shade, and that filigreed ironwork South Africans call broekie lace. This guide collects the Victorian stays on Spekboom, city and country, and answers the questions the style always raises.
