A beautiful house and location but beware of the owners. They are extremely rude and offensive.
The house is exactly as described with 5 bedrooms (for 10 people) and good entertaining areas. However, if you want to use any of it, it will take you an hour to put all the trinkets and glass somewhere safe.
Coming in from Australia we booked for 5 nights with the plan to catch up with friends and family. Noting the no events policy I thought best to clear it upfront before arriving whether hosting 2 BBQ's with family and friends would be acceptable (max 20 people each). The owners confirmed prior to arriving that this would be ok. So we followed through with the booking.
We arrived and handover was brief with the owners doing a quick run through of the house. The house is exactly as per the photos but in our opinion contained too many personal items including many personal photos some of which are inappropriate as they contain half naked woman.
Thinking we were on the same page we proceeded to host the pre agreed BBQs. Details as follows:
Thursday night when we arrived we ordered pizzas and my parents and siblings popped over to see where we stayed and to appreciate the beautiful location.
Friday night there were 8 friends low key with no loud music. Load shedding from 8pm-10pm ensured we were inside. Ended at 11pm.
Saturday there were 15 adults (including my parents in their 70's) and 8 kids for late lunch. Last guests started leaving from 8:30pm.
Around 8:30pm on Saturday night the owners (who live on the property) cornered my wife outside and proceeded to yell at her telling her how unacceptable it was that we were having a party. My wife felt obliged to apologise but came back into the house shaking from the encounter.
10 minutes later after cornering my wife, they banged on the door again and stormed in. In the house was my family (myself, my wife and my two 4 yr old kids) and one friend. They proceeded to shout and swear at us again this time in front of my 4 yr olds kids which was totally unacceptable. My friend took our kids upstairs to avoid the abuse. I proceeded to evidence the email exchange confirming we had agreed to have two BBQ's. They disagreed stating they didnt agree to it even though it was in black and white that they had. Further arguments were had and it was agreed that we were to leave the next morning and they would provide a refund.
We did leave the next day. We paid their cleaner R400 per day for the 3 days that we used the house. The owners stated we left the house in a mess, although it was only glasses and cups that the cleaner had to wash. Nothing else was left dirty. They said we stole 2 towels - why on earth would we take 2 towels? Also that we went into a no-go area (laundry) to fetch additional towels. Agree it was no-go, but where else could we find swimming towels as they were no where to be found?
While we did get a refund it was a lot less than agreed. We have not argued the refund as we just want to be done with this whole experience.