A few years ago I started noticing the same conversation at dinner parties. Someone would be back from a weekend in the Karoo, or the Cederberg, or some unpronounceable corner of the Klein Karoo, talking about how they had slept under stars they did not know existed and made coffee from a kettle on a wood stove. The bed had been hard. The shower had been a hose. The wifi had been an aspiration. They had loved every minute.

I would smile and nod and pretend to relate. Inside, I would think the same thing every time. That sounds terrible.

But here is the thing. They kept doing it. And then more people I knew started doing it. And then, eventually, I started doing it too, in a way that suggests something larger was happening than just a few friends becoming temporarily insufferable about authenticity.

The South African farmhouse stay has quietly become one of the country's most talked-about categories of hospitality. It has its own Instagram aesthetic, its own loose marketing vocabulary, and an entire emerging class of property owners who have figured out that the broken windmill in the back paddock is now an asset rather than a problem. It is also, in my experience, one of the most variable, contradictory, and quietly mismarketed categories of accommodation in the country.

This is a piece about what is actually happening here, and whether the genuine version of the farmhouse stay still exists, or whether what you are mostly buying now is a polished idea of it.

The Setup

Let me describe the prototype, since that is mostly what people are imagining.

You drive out from a city, usually Cape Town, for somewhere between three and six hours. The road narrows. The signal drops. You pass a town called something like De Doorns or Sutherland or Prince Albert, where you fill up with petrol and buy biltong from a shop that has not been renovated since 1987. You keep going. The landscape opens up into the kind of South African scenery that catches international visitors off guard, the great pale plains of the Karoo or the rust-red sandstone of the Cederberg or the wind-stripped silence of the Tankwa.

Eventually you arrive at a gate. The gate is open. The road inside the gate is dirt. You drive for another fifteen minutes through fields with sheep on them, or grapevines, or whatever the local agricultural economy happens to be. You park in front of a building that was built sometime between 1830 and 1920 and was once the main house of a working farm.

The owners come out. They are, depending on which version of the prototype you have booked, either a fifth-generation farming family who have opened up the side cottage for guests, or a couple from Cape Town in their mid-fifties who bought the farm five years ago and have spent two of those rebuilding it. The dog is, in both versions, a Labrador.

They show you to your room, which has whitewashed walls and exposed beams and a fireplace that they will light for you in the evening. There is no television. The wifi password is a joke. The bath has clawed feet. The view is, by any reasonable standard, one of the more beautiful views you will see in your life. Through the bedroom window, in summer, you can hear the wind moving over the wheat. In winter, you can hear nothing at all.

They will serve you dinner at a long shared table. The dinner will involve lamb. They will pour wine from the local cooperative or, if the farm is sufficiently aspirational, from a small-batch producer two valleys over. After dinner, you will sit by a fire under stars more numerous than you have any psychological framework for. Someone, eventually, will say it.

I have not seen stars like this since I was a child.

This is the moment the entire industry is selling.

The Stars Are Real

Let me start with what is genuine, because the cynicism comes after.

The stars are real. The landscapes are real. The silence is real. The South African interior contains some of the most spectacular and underpopulated wilderness in the world, and the rural night sky in the Karoo or the Northern Cape is, objectively, one of the great visual experiences our species can have. There is a reason the South African Astronomical Observatory was built in Sutherland. The atmospheric clarity is exceptional and the light pollution is functionally nonexistent.

The communal-meal-by-a-fire thing is also real. There is something genuinely restorative about eating slowly cooked food at a long table with people you have just met, in the kind of darkness that does not exist in cities. The conversations are different. The pace is different. The mobile phone stays in the room because there is no point checking it.

The walks are real. The morning coffee on a stoep looking at a horizon that does not contain a building is real. The dogs are real and uncomplicatedly happy in a way that house dogs in cities are not. The owners are usually genuinely interesting people, often with backstories that involve some combination of corporate burnout, an inheritance, a divorce, or a quiet midlife rearrangement of priorities.

When the farmhouse stay works, it works for reasons that have nothing to do with hospitality in the conventional sense and everything to do with what the surrounding environment does to your nervous system. The bed could be a hammock. The bathroom could be a tin shed. The food could be terrible. None of it would matter, because you are not there for the room.

This is the thing the genre gets right. Almost everywhere else in the world's luxury hospitality, the room is the experience. The hotel produces the experience. In a farmhouse stay, the room is essentially incidental and the landscape produces the experience. Once you accept this, the entire category makes sense.

The problem is that not everyone has accepted it. Including, often, the people running the places.

The Bed Question

Let us talk about the bed.

I have, over the years, stayed in a number of South African farmhouse-style places. The good ones are very good. The bad ones are bad in a specific and consistent way, and it almost always comes down to the bed.

The South African farmhouse stay aesthetic suggests, broadly, that some degree of rustic discomfort is part of the experience. The owners often lean into this. We have kept things authentic, they will say, gesturing at a mattress that has been authentic since approximately 1992. The pioneers had it harder.

The pioneers, however, were not paying R3,500 a night.

The implicit contract of the farmhouse stay is that you accept a reduction in certain hospitality standards in exchange for an experience you cannot get elsewhere. The wifi is supposed to be bad. The accommodation is supposed to be simple. The hot water is supposed to be limited. These are features, not bugs, and the people who book farmhouse stays mostly understand this going in.

What is harder to accept is when the rusticity is doing real work to obscure things that were never charming to begin with. A bed that is genuinely uncomfortable. A bathroom that has not been cleaned thoroughly. A breakfast that is technically homemade but also clearly the same breakfast served to every guest for the past six years. There is a version of the farmhouse stay that hides ordinary lapses behind the aesthetic of authenticity, and once you have been to a few of them, you start to notice the difference between charmingly rustic and just not very well run.

The honest reality, after a number of these stays, is that maybe two in ten have been genuinely excellent. Two have been good. Six have been somewhere between fine and disappointing. This ratio, I will note, is dramatically worse than the ratio at boutique hotels of similar price, where the standards are higher and the failure modes are different and usually less aesthetic.

For most travellers, the question is whether the two-in-ten experience justifies the other eight. For some it does. The good ones are good in a way that is genuinely hard to find elsewhere, and people who have had one of those experiences will tell you about it for years. For other travellers, the misses pile up faster than the hits and the entire category starts to feel slightly oversold.

I am, broadly, in the second category. But I keep going back, which I think is the more interesting fact about this whole phenomenon.

What Is Actually Happening

The genuine working farm has, in agricultural terms, been in decline in South Africa for decades. Land consolidation, the economics of small-scale farming, urbanisation, generational shifts away from agriculture as a career path. The number of South African family farms has roughly halved since the 1980s, and the remaining ones operate on much tighter margins than they once did.

What this has produced is a peculiar economic landscape. There are now thousands of South African properties that were once working farms but no longer are, or are still technically working but at a scale that no longer pays the bills on its own. Their owners have had to find supplementary income, and the easiest supplement available is the spare cottage, the renovated dairy, the converted stables. Hence the explosion of farmhouse accommodation on Airbnb, Booking.com, and the various local platforms that aggregate this kind of property.

A meaningful proportion of what is marketed as a "working farm stay" is, in honest terms, a non-working farm with a few sheep visible from the kitchen window. This is not necessarily a criticism. The owners are running viable small hospitality businesses on properties that would otherwise have been broken up or sold to corporate agriculture. They have preserved buildings, kept rural communities alive, and contributed real economic value to small towns that have very little else. The Cederberg, the Tankwa, the Klein Karoo, the Overberg, large parts of the Eastern Cape, all of these regions have rural economies that lean more heavily on tourism revenue now than they ever did on agriculture.

But the marketing language has not really caught up with the reality. The genuine working farm stay, where you can wake up at 5am and help bring the cows in, exists, but is rare. The aspirational version of it, where you have a hot shower in a converted milking shed and the owner runs the property primarily as a hospitality business with some symbolic agricultural activity, is much more common. Both can be genuinely lovely. They are also genuinely different things, and the customer often does not know which one they have booked until they arrive.

The second pattern is the rise of what I would call the new money farm. This is the property that has been bought, in the last decade or so, by someone who made enough money in another industry to buy a remote farm as a passion project. They have rebuilt the main house, added a tasteful pool, hired a small staff, and turned the entire operation into a high-end hospitality business with the agricultural framing as backdrop. These places can be exceptional. They are also no longer farmhouse stays in any meaningful sense. They are small boutique hotels with a rural location and a particular aesthetic. The price reflects this.

These are the places where the bed is good, the food is great, the staff are trained, and the wifi works. They are also, increasingly, where most of the genuinely satisfying farmhouse-style stays now happen. The contradiction in the category, then, is that the version of the farmhouse stay most people actually want is the version that has stopped being a farmhouse stay.

Babylonstoren and the Question of Where the Line Goes

The most prominent example of this is Babylonstoren, on the road between Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. Babylonstoren is technically a working farm. It has actually working orchards, vegetable gardens, livestock, a wine cellar, and a comprehensive agricultural operation. It also has roughly twelve restored farm cottages available as accommodation, two restaurants, a spa, a bakery, a cheese-making operation, a contemporary art space, and several other hospitality verticals integrated into the property.

Is Babylonstoren a farmhouse stay? In one sense, obviously yes. The cottages are restored Cape Dutch farm buildings, the food at the restaurants is from the gardens, the experience of walking through the eight-acre formal garden in the morning is exactly the kind of agricultural-aesthetic experience the genre promises.

In another sense, obviously no. Babylonstoren is a luxury hospitality business with a working farm attached. The cottages cost from R8,500 a night. The staff-to-guest ratio is what you would expect from a five-star property. The dinner at Babel is closer to a destination restaurant than to a shared farm table. The whole thing is, in operational terms, much more like a small luxury hotel that happens to have agriculture than a farm that happens to have a few rooms.

This is not a criticism of Babylonstoren. The property is, in my view, one of the better hospitality experiences in the country, and the working farm is a meaningful and well-integrated part of what they offer. But it is a useful example of how blurry the category has become. If Babylonstoren counts as a farmhouse stay, then the category includes pretty much any rural luxury hotel in the country. If it does not, then almost everything currently marketed as a farmhouse stay is in some sense a watered-down imitation of the real thing.

The honest answer is probably that the genuine farmhouse stay and the high-end farm-themed luxury property are two different categories that share a vocabulary. The first is the rustic, owner-run, often quietly imperfect property that sells you the landscape and the silence. The second is a polished hospitality product that uses the imagery of the first.

Both are valid. Customers should know which they are buying.

Who Actually Chooses This

The interesting demographic question is who, exactly, is driving the farmhouse stay boom.

A few patterns are visible in who I know who has done these trips. The first is locals, generally South African urbanites, who have done the Cape Town hotel circuit and the Sun City circuit and the Greater Kruger circuit and are looking for something less polished. They are budget-conscious by South African standards, or they have just been to all the obvious places already and want something different. They are not, generally, the people booking R8,500-a-night cottages at Babylonstoren. They are the people booking R1,800-a-night spare cottages in the Cederberg via Airbnb.

The second is older travellers, often retired or semi-retired, who genuinely value rural quiet in a way that younger travellers often do not yet understand. The complete absence of background urban noise becomes, after a few decades of city life, something you actively seek out. These travellers are repeat customers in a way that the once-and-done photo-shoot generation is not.

The third, more recent, is the slow-travel international visitor who has been told that the farmhouse stay is the authentic South African experience. This is sometimes true and sometimes a marketing artefact, and the experience varies enormously depending on whether the visitor lands at one of the genuinely good properties or one of the eight-in-ten others. International visitors choosing a farmhouse stay over a safari lodge are usually doing so for reasons of either novelty, budget, or having already done a safari on a previous trip. This is a relatively small but growing segment.

What is consistent across all three groups is that the experience works best when it is part of something else. A farmhouse night between Cape Town and a safari lodge, breaking up the journey and providing a contrast. A weekend in the Cederberg after a few weeks of city work. A multi-day road trip through the Karoo as part of a longer South African circuit. The farmhouse stay rarely works as the destination of a trip in the way a safari lodge or a Cape Town beachfront hotel does. It works as a punctuation, a reset, or an interlude.

Anyone considering a week-long farmhouse stay as their primary South African experience should do so with their eyes open. The first two nights will be transcendent. The third will be lovely. The fourth will feel slightly long. By the fifth, you will be quietly checking flights home.

A Specific Memory

One night in the Karoo, on a stay I had booked partly out of curiosity and partly because the previous night's accommodation had fallen through, I sat outside on a wooden bench while the owners' Labrador snored against my leg.

The farmhouse itself had been adequate. The bed had been firm in a way that suggested either authenticity or a deal with a discount mattress wholesaler. The shower had been a hand-held thing that delivered water in a tone of mild resentment. The dinner had been excellent because the owners knew what they were doing with meat, and the wine had been from a local cooperative whose name I have since forgotten but whose product was significantly better than I expected.

What I remember, three years later, is none of those details. I remember sitting on the bench at about 9pm with the dog and a glass of brandy, looking at a sky I would have called impossible if I had not been looking at it, and thinking the thought that the whole category exists to provoke.

I have not done this in a long time.

Not the sitting outside, particularly, or the brandy, or the dog. The not-checking-anything. The not-doing-anything. The sustained continuous looking at one thing for long enough that you start to actually see it. There was no signal on my phone. There was no television in the room. There was nothing scheduled until breakfast. The owners had gone to bed. The dog was already asleep. The wind was doing something gentle and continuous over the fields.

This is what the farmhouse stay is selling. Not the bed, not the food, not the dog, not even really the stars. It is selling the absence of everything that demands your attention, and the slow rediscovery of the version of yourself that exists when nothing is demanding your attention.

When the category works, it works because it manages to deliver that experience. The accommodation could be roughly anything, as long as it is in a place where that experience is possible. The shower could be a hose. The bed could be hard. None of it matters at the moment when you are looking at the sky and remembering what your own brain sounds like when nothing is interrupting it.

When the category does not work, it is usually because the accommodation has imperfections that distract you from the surroundings. A bed that hurts your back keeps you awake. A bathroom that is unclean makes you want to leave. A breakfast that is bad reminds you that you are paying for this. The trick is that the room has to be just good enough to disappear, so that the landscape can do its work.

The genuinely excellent farmhouse stays understand this. The mediocre ones do not.

Whether This Is a Trend or Something Larger

Trends in hospitality come and go. The boutique hotel was a trend that became a category. The all-inclusive resort was a trend that became a category. The pop-up restaurant remained a trend. The escape-room hotel did not really become anything. It is too early to say whether the farmhouse stay is a flash in the pan or the beginning of something more lasting.

My own suspicion is that it is the beginning of something more lasting, but the version that lasts will not look exactly like the current version.

What I think will continue is the broad shift toward slower, more rooted, more rural travel as a counterweight to increasingly urban and digital daily lives. This is a global trend rather than a specifically South African one. The South African expression of it has its own particular vocabulary (the Cape Dutch farmhouse, the Karoo silence, the working winelands estate), but the underlying impulse is recognisable to anyone watching the same trend in the Cotswolds, in upstate New York, in the south of France, in rural Japan.

What I think will not continue is the casual, owner-run, lightly-managed version. The marketing demands will outpace the willingness of owners to amateur-run a hospitality business, and the better properties will professionalise. The ones that do not will be displaced by the ones that do, or by the dedicated platforms that aggregate them and impose standards. Within five years, I suspect the genuinely amateur farmhouse stay will be quite hard to find, and the professionalised version will dominate the category.

This is probably good for guests and probably bittersweet for the genre. The properties will be better. The beds will be more reliable. The bathrooms will work. But something of the original spirit, the genuinely unmediated encounter between a guest and a working farm and its owners, will be hard to preserve as the category scales. It is the same arc that boutique hotels followed, and travel itself, and almost every other form of experience that originally derived its power from being uncurated.

I would rather a good night's sleep than the genuine spirit of the thing, most of the time, which probably tells you all you need to know about why I am only a half-hearted convert to the genre.

But on a clear night in the Karoo, with the right dog snoring against my leg and a glass of brandy in my hand, I will admit the case for the original spirit is real. I will also admit it is not what I am usually buying when I book.

The country is too big and too quiet to spend all of your time inside it. The farmhouse stay, in its best version, gives you a way back outside.

That, in the end, is what the whole quiet rise of the thing is about.