High on a hill lay a lovely Swiss Farm

Every weekend when she was a child, Lodine Kriel and her family would occupy the same table at the Swiss Farm Excelsior in Franschhoek for Sunday lunch.

As she grew older, she befriended one of the sons of the owners and, with other children from the town, would sneak onto the premises to play.

On more than one occasion, they’d be chased out by the owner’s stern wife. Little did she know the lady would one day become her mother-in-law.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous to call a four-star hotel with more than 60 rooms and suites as well as a dozen standalone villas a “wellkept secret” but it is certainly often ignored in favour of smaller, fancier and much pricier establishments in the French corner of the Western Cape Winelands.

This is despite the fact that the 57-year-old beauty, now known as Le Franschhoek Hotel and Spa, compares very favourably in terms of setting with the grand dame of Constantia and one of the loveliest hotels in the world, the Cellars-Hohenort.

ALSO READ: Fatal mistakes in route-planning

Le Franschhoek is generally overlooked because it is literally off the beaten tourist track. That’s because almost everyone who drives up the main road to the t-junction at the Huguenot Monument turns left towards the spectacular Franschhoek Pass or retraces their route out through the village.

Very few turn right onto what is still referred to as the Excelsior Road which ends in a cul-de-sac at the top of Bulhoek. The story begins with the birth in November 1900 of Ulrich Herbert Maske, the youngest of seven children to an immigrant of 13 years previously from Germany, in Aberdeen near Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape Karoo.

Come the end of World War I in 1918 and having completed his high-schooling in Paarl (recounts Ludwig Maske, Lodine’s husband), his grandfather returned to Aberdeen and began farming.

However, the privations and frustrations of a life of the soil were not for him and by the late 1920s he’d moved back to the town.

Thanks to a £100 loan by Castle Wine and Brandy in Port Elizabeth – now Gqeberha – he bought the local hotel.

The place thrived as Aberdeen straddled one of the main transport routes from the Cape to the north of the country and it wasn’t long before Ulrich was buying up adjacent properties to expand his hotel.

The end of WWII (1945) proved another landmark year because that’s when Maske decided he’d had enough of the droughtplagued Karoo and recalled a small mountain-ringed town where he’d played rugby as a schoolboy.

ALSO READ: Find peace in the bush, where the big 5 take a backseat to tranquil beauty

Franschhoek, he told his wife, was the antithesis of Aberdeen because it was verdant and a river with clear, sweet water flowed perenially through the valley.

The biggest farm in the Bulhoek section of Franschhoek was Keerweder. Kehrwieder has multiple meanings in German, including “dead end” and “farewell”, the latter in the sense of “haste ye back” and it was owned by a Swiss gentleman, Mr Hinder.

The two quickly became friends… hardly surprising as they were two of only three Englishspeaking men in town.

On the farm was a small but popular guesthouse. Travellers asking for lodging were directed to “the Swissman’s farm” or simply “The Swiss Farm”.

Mr Hinder, however, was experiencing some marital strife. Faced with an ultimatum from his wife to leave Franschhoek forthwith, he sold the place to Maske.

There were originally only five rooms, so the new owner quickly added a dozen more and also hired a group of Italian prisoners of war (all qualified masons) to build tennis courts and do decorative stonework.

A former German prisoner captured in what is now Namibia was elevated to farm manager and given 15 hectares to cultivate himself.

This wasn’t enough for the gogetting hotelier and the mid-’50s saw him engage a local company to commence his magnum opus… build the hotel essentially as it stands today.

“People said he was mad as he began excavating a huge site below the existing facilities,” recalls Ludwig, and indeed the project was nearly scuppered at the start.

“The builders were a family named Groenewald and, although I can’t remember the details, the only reason construction went ahead was because one of the sons went to jail for a crime the father commited.”

The total cost came to £50 000. The hotel opened in 1957 and Maske named it Excelsior – “higher or superior place” – but old habits die hard and it became known – first in the vernacular and then formally – as Swiss Farm Excelsior.

Ludwig’s father Tristan took over the running of the hotel when he returned from hotel school in Switzerland in the ’60s and following Ulrich’s death in 1967.

He was ably (and fiercely) supported by his wife, Beryl, and the rest of the family pitched in wherever and whenever needed.

“What a place it was,” remembers Ludwig of the place’s heyday in the early ’70s.

“Our dining room could seat 200 people and there were usually two sittings per meal.

“We offered a full table d’hote menu breakfast, lunch and dinner… up to 15 courses at a time.

“We were almost self-sustaining with the farm providing fruit, vegetables, pork, eggs, poultry and milk.”

Swiss Farm Excelsior also became renowned for its Sunday afternoon tea and scones.

Their popularity was due as much to the fact that the liquorlicencing laws allowed lunchtime diners to be served alcohol on Sundays with a hiatus of a few hours before the bar opened to the public, as to the quality of its pastries.

“People would come back year after year for their holidays, taking the same rooms, sitting at the same tables, asking for the same waiters. “Some people would come for an entire month with their families and domestic servants.”

It eventually became too much for the Maskes and the family sold out to a dodgy debarred lawyer in 1984.

They lost a fortune, as did most people who invested in the new owner’s scheme to convert Swiss Farm Excelsior into a timeshareoperation.

Hotel-management companies came and went. With the hotel becoming increasingly dilapidated and its reputation in tatters, it was acquired in 2004 by Robert Mainguard.

He immediately began extensive renovations before reopening the following year as Le Franschhoek Hotel and Spa (www. lefranschhoek.co.za).

Still owned by the Mainguard family, Le Franschhoek has been operated under a full business lease by Dream Hotels and Resorts for the past decade.

During this time it has begun clawing its way back to its former elegance. Le Franschhoek Hotel and Spa has a four-star SA Tourism grading.

Two estates worth visiting in the immediate vicinity are Colmant, which makes one of the finest Cap Classique ranges in South Afric,a and Boekenhoutskloof, producers of the immensely popular Chocolate Block red blend.

Tastings at the latter (www. boekenhoutskloof.co.za) are infrequent and strictly by appointment only.

NOW READ: Affordable Holiday Destinations in South Africa for the Festive Season