Our Story
What would a stay look like if the staff cared about the answer?
rimavely opened in 2014 in a refurbished 19th-century townhouse on Huguenot Road, five minutes' walk from the Huguenot Memorial and the museum that records how French families settled this valley from 1688. The building spent most of its life as a wine merchant's home; we kept the Oregon pine floors, the pressed-metal ceilings, the shuttered sash windows and the wide stoep, and built around them. The renovation took fourteen months and involved three craftspeople from Paarl and Wellington who still come back for maintenance work. The result is a 24-room property that doesn't look like it was designed by committee: forest-cream walls, warm timber joinery, and rooms where the furniture sits where it actually makes sense to put it. We host independent travellers, couples, and the occasional small group from Tuesday to Sunday who choose Franschhoek specifically — not as a stop between Cape Town and the Garden Route, but as a destination. The village has one of the highest concentrations of serious kitchens in South Africa, a wine industry older than almost anything else in the country, and a valley you can cross on foot in an afternoon; we think it deserves a hotel that takes all of that seriously.
There are eleven of us. Four are front-of-house and concierge, two look after the kitchen and breakfast service, two handle housekeeping, and three run the property's operations and administration. Most of us have lived in the valley or nearby in Paarl and Stellenbosch for more than a decade; our head of concierge, Deon Jacobs, grew up on a farm at the top of the pass. Between us we work in English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa — three of South Africa's twelve official languages — and we will happily find someone who speaks a fourth. We operate on one principle that shapes every decision: if a guest has to ask for something twice, we have made an error. That sounds simple and it is — the discipline comes in the follow-through. We don't use an automated messaging system for pre-arrival contact; a member of the front desk team writes to each guest personally three days before arrival. We don't have a fixed upsell script; if a room upgrade isn't worth it for your dates, we'll say so. We are also honest about our limits. rimavely is not the right choice for large group bookings of more than ten rooms, for weddings needing outside catering, or for guests who need 24-hour room service — our kitchen closes at 22:00. For everything within our scope, we give it full attention.
We have been refining the same approach for over a decade — adjusting what works, dropping what doesn't, and asking guests directly what they wished had been different. Registered with the CIPC as rimavely (Pty) Ltd, reg. 2014/318476/07.
A small, stable team means you will recognise the same faces across a week-long stay. We have almost no seasonal turnover — most of us have been here since the first year, through every harvest and every wet winter.
We have been included in curated South African travel guides by three independent writers since 2019 — none of whom were offered a complimentary stay in exchange for the mention.
34 Huguenot Road, Franschhoek, Western Cape, 7690. Phone: +27 21 876 3402 (021 876 3402 locally). Email: [email protected]. We are at the front desk from 08:00 to 22:00 SAST on weekdays and until 23:00 on Friday and Saturday evenings. Franschhoek is about 75 minutes from Cape Town International Airport on the N1 and the R45 through Paarl, or over the Helshoogte Pass from Stellenbosch.