HERE'S TO A STORY DRIVEN YEAR AT THE KAROO ART HOTEL

In 1995 Sputnik, the hotel's much loved Rolls Royce Silver Cloud Wraith, has continued to be the vehicle for many a hotel story session with visiting celebrities and others of note. A 1980 Silver Wraith is a beautiful thing – especially on a dust road. But there is another Rolls Royce year I lean to: 1922, the year of the Silver Ghost.

“He grates the gears a lot but he enjoys it”

Watch Rick's Interview With the Couple Here

Trevor and Sharon Binder, parents of MOTO GP ace Brad Binder (KTM) driving a 1922 Silver Ghost were one of hundreds of owners of extraordinary cars who graced our front entrance this year.

Amor, with our go to recipe book for classic Karoo dishes infront of trusty Aga invented in 1922

We must be the only 4 Star hotel worldwide with a working coal fired Aga in the dining
room.

Like the Roorkhee chairs and the bags from the high end retro Safari luggage and campaign accessory business that Sue and I founded in 1988, Melvill and Moon, our Aga speaks of the Age of empire and that of the Grand Safari era. Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame’s cook Kamante used the exact same model as ours.

Karen Blixon’s lover Grand Safari icon Dennis Finch Hatton with his Gypsy Moth at Voi just prior to its fateful crashing. 

Out of Africa, Dennis Finch Hatton, a country hotel infused with the spirit of Laudator Temporis Acti (‘The Romance of an Age gone by’ our Melvill and Moon motto (and positioning statement), it all sounds very British Colonial, but just as Karen Blixen wasn’t English, nor is our Aga.

As our growing list of European road trippers all know the Aga is the invention of Swiss Nobel laureate Gustave Dalen. Invented as a gift to his wife while recovering from an accident that left him blind. The year? 1922.Our AGA is still fed in the original way. With Anthracite: Clean burning but dusty all the same and separated from all that white linen and elegant dining by a steadfast Falkirk No 1 that’s been transformed into a coal scuttle.

The Falkirk 1 boiler is biggest pot ever produced by the historic Scottish Falkirk iron company. They were also the creators of the iconic three legged South African cooking pot known as a Potjie. Originally created for cloths washing, the journey of our No 1 included time as soup pot on a Boer War troupe train in 1900.

The AGA’S journey with us charts some of the best years of our lives . We first bought it to be the central feature of our production office at The Blue Moon Company (1995). An otherwise high-tech space populated by young designers, producers, film and art directors. That’s where Sue pioneered the South African communications medium of Industrial Theatre and where we rolled it out everywhere from mining to banking to brewing. Those were the heydays of Blue Moon for us, before selling out to a Johannesburg stock exchange listed group in 2000. And that’s when we left to start Melvill and Moon. The Moon as a link to Blue Moon. We took our AGA with us, to our farm, The Prynnsberg Estate.

There it became the alter of slow cooked lamb and free range farm beef in a storied Eastern Free State Sandstone mansion created by the Kimberly diamond magnate Charles Newberry in 1885. It took Sue and I twenty years to renovate the Manor House and the many other heritage buildings at Prynnsberg. We took it all from a near ruin to the cover of Conde Nast International Travel in 2021. The year in which we turned our back on that dictum in the of a chapel window at my old school St Andrews College in the Eastern Cape; “Stop doubting and believe”. With the project on a rocket ship of a launchpad we sold.

Read More Here

Beyond the AGA and much of the furnishing of the hotel there’s a link to our Prynnsberg era in the hotel via the Prynnsberg Room up in the west wing.

Design wise the Prynnsberg Room is light years away from the likes of the Magnolia Room (celebrating the work of South African Artist Tretchikoff, the most successful selling commercial artist of the twentieth century). Or the look and feel of the Baines’ Room - in celebration of Thomas Baines the Livingstone era artist (1820-1875), not to be confused with Thomas Bain the master road builder (of 1830-1893) of nearby Tradauw Pass fame. Or the vibe of the GVW room, kindly adopted and decorated by South African advertising creative legend, and Great Gatsby fan Graham Victor Warsop.

So it was with Sues’ décor vision for the hotel at the time of our take over and renovation in 2022: Every one of the 17 hotel rooms different, each with a specific story to tell.

Click here for more room information

It was to the slow cooking magic of the AGA that Batro our pudding genius turned for Christmas pudding production.

As the flyer says on the reception desk, one a day is the AGA way for these legendary puddings. It’s not a day, it’s an all nighter. Batro does the mix in the afternoon and into the slow oven it goes: top left. And off home he goes at the end of the evening shift. Out it comes at breakfast. It’s been going on like that this since August. Up to a point these puddings only get better thanks to a healthy weekly Spritz of Joseph Barry brandy. Up to
what point? Perhaps explosion ! There’s a lot of brandy in the vintage series.

Batro’s pudding will be the final feature on the Christmas day menu. Hopeful of providing something we regularly get asked for, a kitchen recipe, I asked Batro for something hand written for printing and attachment onto the Christmas lunch menu’s. Back came 3 pages of foolscap. Welcome to the world of authenticity and originality.

On that score News 62 Journalist Mickey Menz popped around and made a great alternative
to all that A4.

WATCH: A step by step guide to Batro's AGA Christmas Pudding

We’re so much looking forward to the arrival of another story driven year. The program gets populated as we go and not up yet are all the Dale events; Ferrari-Dale, Morgan-Dale, Shadow-Dale, Vintage-Dale, Cape1000-Dale, Harley-Dale ? KTM-Dale ? Duel-Dale ? Joining the Karoo Art’s ‘Art of’ themes will be Art of the Passes (Craig Harper’s red hot sports car group weekend).

Just yesterday we had an interaction with the poet Archie Swanson about a poetry event currently percolating and a response to a fun brief: “If you are to pop bye and do a reading in the bar one night, what about something about fish for us to promote a Gansbaai fish special to go along with your poetry?”

Fish special for a poetry evening in the making. Archie Swanson

This, for us, is the joy of the Karoo Art Hotel. It’s a rolling exercise in creative development. Underpinned by that increasingly rare thing to find as we all plummet headlong into the new world of AI; Authenticity.