When I read a review about the Giraffe Manor in the Saturday Telegraph, my colleague Marc Carter, who has visited Nairobi a couple of times in the past year, told me that you can actually see the hotel from the elephant orphanage in Nairobi, see my earlier post, from where the giraffes can be fed. 

The Giraffe Manor was built as a family home in 1931 in the beautiful Nairobi suburb of Langata and is home to eleven Rothschild giraffes, of which there are only a few hundred left in the wild. It is probably one of the most original places to stay in the Kenyan capital.

Modelled on an Art Deco Scottish hunting lodge, the manor was bought in 1974 by Jock and Betty Leslie-Melville, who turned its 140 acres of indigenous forest into a small hotel and centre for the preservation of the Rothschild giraffe, dedicated to reintroducing the giraffes into the wild.

In 2009 it was bought by the Carr Hartley family, and today it has 10 lovely, antique-filled bedrooms – six in the main house and four new rooms in the garden manor – a herd of Rothschild giraffes and an education centre for tourists and local schoolchildren.

The best times of day at the manor are breakfast in the sun room, when the giraffes stick their heads through the open windows to say hello, and sunset, when they like to come up to guests enjoying sundowners on the terrace.

Lunches and dinners – modern takes on traditional dishes – are taken in the wood-panelled dinging-room or under the stars.

Via: The Telegraph