About Glen Avon Lodge Hotel

Glen Avon is owned and managed by the Stringer family and our guests are made to feel very much ‘at home’. The Cape Dutch Manor House is the focal point of the estate, and comprises of the general areas of the lounge, dining room, check-in office and kitchen area.

There are unique accommodation facilities throughout the property, overlooking the neatly manacured gardens, with rolling lawns and beautiful rose beds throughout. ‘The Gables’, is an adjacent property, and has been incorporated into the hotel grounds. This property consists of four deluxe suites, a two bedroomed cottage and a boardroom retreat. There is an eleven meter salt water swimming pool in the main hotel garden overlooked by the Deluxe suites and a smaller pool on, ‘The Gables’ side of the garden. There is a lapa area and the pool gardens are scattered with large comfy plush loungers, to soak up the sun or quietly read your favourite book under the shade of the years old oak trees.

Our knowledgable staff are always ‘on hand’ to assist in any way they can and have personally visited most of the tourist attractions in and around Cape Town. In winter, they are taken out to visit places of interest to expand and broaden their knowledge of Cape Town and the Constantia area.

A Little History

The title deeds for the property, ‘Glen Avon’, date back legibly to 1756 and although we are not sure when the house was originally built, we do know that it was built by the slaves of that time and that prayer books and mint coins were placed in the corners of the house for ‘good luck’ for the farmer, who owned the property. The Strawberry Lane area was, before the apartheid era, mainly owned by the Muslim fraternity, as they had settled around an Imam, who was banished for practising his religion, to what was, in the early days of the Dutch East India Company, identified as a wilderness area, as their religion was against the law, during those early days of slavery at the Cape. After slavery was abolished at the Cape on the 1st December 1834 and the freed slaves had spent a further four years apprenticeship to assist the farmers with their labour losses, many of these freed peoples settled around the Muslim Imam and took up farming fruit, vegetables and flowers, along the Spaanschemat River to sell on the Cape Town market.

The other side of the river formed part of the postal route between Muizenberg and Cape Town. When the Apartheid system was introduced in 1948 and forced removals took place from the early 1950’s. Sadly, these families were split up and forcibly moved out of the area, and Constantia became a ‘whites only’ area. The Muslim graveyard behind Glen Avon was nevertheless retained by the Muslim people and as the dead had been buried around the perimeter of the graveyard and it had became necessary to convert Strawberry Lane into a proper road, the government then expropriated half the old Manor House, to complete the road, thus demolishing two of the beautiful Dutch Gables. The two front gables still remain to this day and by their shell insignia, they show that the slaves originated from somewhere around Java.

Glen Avon has been restored by the present owners to its former glory, after this sad time in the history of South Africa. In 1997, the doors of the guesthouse with four guest rooms in the main Manor House opened for business. Over the following years between 1997 and 2014 surrounding properties were purchased and Glen Avon expanded to offer fifteen guest rooms and the owners house, which has now re-located to a property opposite the guest house. In 2015 the adjacent property was purchased, thus adding to the gardens at Glen Avon and providing a retreat, where boardroom meetings can be held in the peace and tranquility of this magnificent piece of Constantia real estate. This is a much loved family property and we hope that your stay will be both enjoyable and relaxing.

Eco Friendly

Glen Avon is dedicated to being as green and eco-friendly as possible. We have added heat pumps to all our rooms to save electricity and photo voltaic cells have been installed as a backup for power outages, to light some of the rooms, keep our computers and fridges working. This project is ongoing and will be added to each year. All our bathroom products are made locally and are eco friendly, as well as most of our cleaning materials. Our entire toilet system runs on grey water together with our garden water for irrigation. We re-cycle most of our waste and all our vegetable matter is used for our own composting. We have received the GT-ACTIVE GREEN Certificate and are very proud of our efforts.

Social Responsibility

We are involved in the SOIL FOR LIFE NGO project and also support the ORIGINAL T-BAG DESIGN factory, that manages to keep around fourteen people from the Hout bay Township area, fully employed. This is a staff project and they are all involved in saving and drying the used teabags from the hotel which is then sent to the factory, where they are emptied for composting and the bags are ironed and painted in all different designs and used in the making of all sorts of saleable goods. They have a shop in Hout Bay and at the Waterfront Shed area. The Soil for Life project reaches out into the poorer community to teach them how to build the soil for our future and to grow their own vegetables in tiny garden patches, at schools and other open areas, where they can feed their families and sell off the balance, thereby earning a living from the earth. All our worn towels and linen are also donated to a variety of deserving causes yearly.