Sea Five, Camps Bay

Sea Five is the sort of place where you feel you are staying with a rich friend in a beautiful house, and the bar is where the feeling starts. It is small, and a cocktail there arrives the way a friend would mix one at home, provided the friend is a very sophisticated one. It was faultless, and the service extraordinary: the people giving it could not have been nicer, which is more than most rich friends manage.

The hotel calls itself a beach house and has dressed for the part: white timber under a covered veranda, teak loungers along the pool, and cushions striped in taupe and white. The stripes do the most work. It also claims a likeness between Cape Town's Atlantic coast and the Riviera, which is easier to believe with a palm tree and the sea in view. Round the house grow mandarin and lemon, lavender and rosemary. Behind the trees, the rock goes straight up the mountain.

We had two rooms. The first was on the ground floor, its doors opening onto a beautifully shaded garden. The second, later, was on the first floor and much larger, with a balcony looking out at the mountains. So the choice is shade or space, and having tried both, we can report that either is the right answer.

The house sits just above Camps Bay, far enough back from the waterfront to feel like a residential street and close enough to walk to everything we needed. The beach is 300 metres away, and Clifton's four beaches about twenty minutes further along the coast on foot. The pool deck makes a strong case against going to either. Breakfast is the only meal in the rate, made to order with fresh fruit and juices, and every morning it was a reason to get up. We unwound completely, and the proof is a significant amount of reading.

There is no restaurant. Lunch and dinner sit outside the rate, though the bar will put together salads and sandwiches on request, and children under eight are not taken: the house is set up for grown-ups and their books. Dinner is on Victoria Road, the strip of restaurants and bars along the beachfront, which puts the evening about as far from the door as the sea.