It’s impossible to prepare for the beauty of Sterrekopje Farm. The 50-hectare estate at the foothills of the Franschhoek mountains feels plucked from the pages of a fairy tale. An hour’s drive east from the frenetic hub of Cape Town and my shoulders have started to drop. Its wild and wispy gardens overflowing with willow trees, pot-bellied piglets and plumes of lavender are balm for the soul.
It was conceived as a ‘healing farm’ by Nicole Boekhoorn and her wife and business partner, Fleur Huijskens, with the pair spending years combing the world looking for a soul-stirring property that allowed visitors to heal in nature, grounded in beauty, feminine energy and warmth. There are no diets or regimes. ‘We wanted to create more of a healing sanctuary. A lot of the high-end wellness hotels around the world always felt very sterile and left us quite cold,’ Huijskens tells me over flat whites and still-warm banana bread in the bakery.
