A weekend away in your own city holds great promise. Unfettered from your` usual patterns, the carapace of responsibility and anxiety melts with each kilometre travelled from home. There are no alarms to activate; you are actually expected not to go near the kitchen and everybody around you aims to please. This is not a tough assignment.
And so it was that we decamped to Fairlawns, a discreetly located boutique hotel just 15km away. The owners, Anna and John Thacker, had always wanted to own a “country hotel”, and that’s what they got when they purchased the four-hectare Sandton property 27 years ago.
Despite an entire business district growing up next door, the Fairlawns Boutique Hotel & Spa has retained its seclusion, making it favoured by celebrities and dignitaries alike.
The Thackers are internationalist in their thinking, and each suite on the property is individually themed and decorated.
We were put up in the de luxe Mahatma Gandhi Courtyard Suite within the original Venetian-styled home that is now the main hotel, with a terrace commanding sweeping views of a beautifully manicured lawn, magnificent old trees and an enticing (had it not been a winter weekend) poolside.
I noted the mixed messages but decided to take the Gandhi reference as validation that the weekend should be spent in a state of nonviolent resistance.
So we ate many courses at dinner, from seared salmon to a sweet corn soufflé, drank aperitifs followed by a choice of wine and were escorted back to our plush accommodation filled with Anna Thacker’s Asian-themed collectibles.
Over a few years of travelling, I have developed a luxury scale. If you want to measure true luxury, pick up a hotel bath towel and hug yourself with it. If it is sparkling white and big enough to cover your entire body and then some, the place hits the top note.
To Fairlawns I would add a hotel “room” large enough to host a respectable-sized party, with a bathroom to match.
The candles and freshly cut, faintly scented fuchsia rose left near the immense bath didn’t detract, nor did the bath products from Provence’s L’Occitane range.
The morning after disappeared in a sumptuous breakfast, selected from a heaving table and a 90-minute full-body hot-stone massage at the Balinese Spa.
With 80 staff members for its 39 rooms, the hotel lets you feel looked after without being intruded upon. In addition, it offers all sorts of little extras, such as a butler service on request, a vegan menu, a shoe-cleaning service, an electronic do-not-disturb system, a selection of DVDs to be watched in your room and a gym.
The Thackers travel the world, bringing back new ideas. They still live on the property and have managed to ensure it feels like home. Its clientele is a mix of leisure and business travellers and the occasional wise person — the Elders, a group of global leaders including Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan, stayed here when they visited South Africa in 2010.
If you were planning on running away from home, you would do well to pick this spot.
Sandton’s contemporary status as home to a significant portion of South Africa’s growing super-rich is not so far from its origins.
History records advanced Iron Age “Bantu-speaking” industrialists and many years later white farmers, or the Voortrekkers of Sandton, making their way across Zandfontein. It was lazy English pronunciation that popularised the name Sandton for what were previously vast tracts of farmland.
Apparently, evidence of early humans has been found in cave sites nearby. Centuries from now, historians might say the same — but instead of a potsherd or an arrowhead, it may the crest of a Mercedes-Benz or a champagne cork bearing the faint and crumbly inscription “Moët” that holds the secrets to an earlier civilisation.
It’s the perfect indulgent weekend break. Sandton is ideally situated to give you easy access to the city’s gigantic shopping mecca, Sandton City, the real countryside in the north in the Cradle of Humankind or the city centre with its weekend markets and cultural life to the south.
Laurice Taitz stayed at Fairlawns on a complimentary basis