O'Lorien Villa

The villa the gardens surround.

Of the three, O'Lorien sits deepest in the planting. Beds of fern and flowering shrub press against its glass on every side; each of the three bedrooms keeps its own way out into the green; and on most days the doors stand open from breakfast until the last lamp, so the rooms and their gardens run together without a seam.

You come to O'Lorien on a grass path beneath a canopy of flowers. There is no hall and no antechamber: the entrance opens straight into the great room. The path becomes the room.

The roof is a single steep A-frame of thatch on timber poles, glazed at the apex with a triangular skylight, so the tallest point of the room is sky. Woven wire-cage pendants hang in a cluster from the ridge, plain shades of white and slate blue inside the cages. At one end sit the show kitchen and a small bar; at the centre, deep seating around a low chest of a table; and the whole garden wall is glass, opening onto the pergola deck so that the room finishes outdoors.

Two courts, and one long view.

Two of the three bedrooms open through steel-framed glass onto planted courts of their own. The third gives that up for distance instead — out across the estate's gardens and down the valley toward the lake. The choice was deliberate: a court on that side would have closed the view, and the view was too good to close.

The rooms themselves stay simple — a bed beneath a fresco arch of sage plaster, a wardrobe niche, lamplight, and glass where a wall would ordinarily be. The sitting happens outside.

This is what guests remember of O'Lorien. Off each garden bedroom lies its own walled court: stone shoulder-high and higher, a pole fence above the line of sight, ferns and staghorns and flowering climbers growing from baskets and crevices in the wall. One court holds the shower — a broad rose set straight into the stone, run in the open air. The other holds a freestanding claw-foot bath, a towel ladder against the ivy, and a stump table for a glass of something cold. Both are entirely private, and neither has a roof.

Inside, each bathroom keeps the same vocabulary — curved sage plaster, terrazzo flecked with green glass, black fittings — so the room and its garden court read as one place.

Nothing here is off the shelf.

Thatch overhead on a frame of lashed poles; walls of estate stone, laid dry — no mortar — by Joseph Kimani and the Kasarani apprenticeship. The sage plaster was developed with specialists from the coast and appears at O'Lorien in its curved vocabulary: arches, niches, the fresco behind each bed. The pendant cages were woven from wire at Lake Victoria, dark and pale, around plain shades of white and slate blue.