Low-key luxury
biggest in Johannesburg. An entry-level luxury suite is 80m
Our stay starts with high tea in the piano lounge. There’s also champagne or orange juice. You get to choose your tea from the Yswara range, which is 100% African and has the most evocative names, like Ooni of Ife (rooibos and lemongrass), Thousand Hills Majesty and Shaka Zulu (rooibos and chilli pepper). When the tea arrives, it’s in a transparent teapot and heated over a tea candle, which ensures it remains hot throughout.
Together with the tea come, first, little shaped sandwiches, cut as attentively as the fresh lawn outside. Then there are fresh scones and cream, and after that the pièce de résistance — small desserts, so delicate and symmetrical that a sense of wonder is evoked.
Most hotels in Johannesburg are inclined towards business, and it’s the same at the Saxon. Discussions, meetings and networking play themselves out in little clusters outside on the patio, inside the piano room and over dinner or breakfast.
There’s the Eighteen05 whisky lounge, where small gatherings of people congregate at night. (From this month the hotel is offering whisky taste experiences, which consist of a three-course dinner paired with whisky and includes exclusive use of the lounge for R2,000/person). The leisure traveller is as at home as much as the business traveller. The spa section is very popular, not only with ladies of leisure but also with businesswomen who are visiting the city as well as those living in it. It is being rebuilt, though the usual treatments (apart from hydrotherapy) are still being offered at a relocated venue, in one of the villas. The new spa will have more treatment rooms (there weren’t enough), and is set to open in October. The rebuilt spa will offer a range of top-end products, and recently added La Prairie (from Switzerland) as well as QMS and Elemis. A signature hammam treatment (a Turkish bath) and Himalayan salt treatments will also be available. I found I was able to de-stress in our own private pad. The bathrooms feel like minispas with the oodles of premium Molton Brown bath products. The oversized gowns, oversized bath,