POD Camps Bay

POD had one job. We were in town for a wedding, at the start of a trip that went on into the Winelands, and the pre-wedding plans took up most of our time, so all the hotel had to be was a good place to rest our heads after a long flight from New York. It did that well, starting with a comfortable bed.

Greg Wright Architects designed it, and it opened in 2010 on Argyle Street: plain, regular blocks of slate and timber above a ground floor that is mostly see-through. The screen at the entrance is made of scaffold planks recycled from the building site, which is one way to tidy up after the builders. The rooms are open-plan and laid out to feel bigger than their footprint. The bed sits in a timber alcove, the basin is a white bowl on black cabinetry under bare hanging bulbs, and in some rooms a glass wall slides back onto a balcony behind a slatted screen. Ours was quite small but perfectly formed, which is the layout doing what it was drawn to do.

Each room was placed for a view, and which one you get, the beach or one of the mountains around it, comes down to what you book. From one of the balconies it runs over the road and a strip of lawn and palms to the sand and the Atlantic; from the roof terrace it goes the other way, over the rooftops of Camps Bay to the cliffs of the Twelve Apostles. The pool is small, a heated lap pool on a deck with the bar beside it, so the lengths are short and the walk to a drink is shorter. What we remember is the view from it over the seafront.

There is no restaurant. Breakfast is included, and after that Camps Bay does the cooking: Victoria Road's restaurants and bars are a few minutes' walk along the strip, and the beach is two minutes away on foot. The Table Mountain cableway is about ten minutes' drive inland, the car park is underground, and there is a gym for anyone with energy left after the flight. Children under twelve are not taken, and with no kids' club and no family rooms it is a hotel for grown-ups, or for a family whose youngest is at least twelve.

In one room the window above the bed is a strip just under the ceiling, and Lion's Head fills it, with a single palm alongside for scale.