Our story

It began with a closed border.

The chain starts with Tim and Terry Andrews. Tim had led World Vision in Kenya and Tanzania for many years; Terry, his wife, was caught on the Kenyan side when Tanzania closed its borders to its own residents. Waiting it out, she found her way to a Bible study in Kasarani — the village on the shores of Lake Naivasha — and met the people behind its youth football academy. She thought of two friends in Hong Kong, and of their four children.

The friends were Cleo and Josh, who now own O'Leleshwa. In the autumn of 2022 they arrived in Kenya with the children, at Tim's invitation, for a semester abroad. Hong Kong had grown hard to bear under its COVID restrictions; Kenya was meant to be a breather, not a turning.

It turned anyway. Cleo began teaching in Kasarani nearly every day — photography, videography, the craft of telling one's own story — and the family fell for the village faster than for the country around it.

The property belonged then to Annalyn, its previous owner. One evening she invited Cleo and Josh over for a glass of wine on the deck of the house that is now O'Lerai. Halfway through the second glass, she asked whether they might want to buy the place.

Josh nearly spilled his wine. They went home and laughed about it — they lived in Hong Kong; the idea was absurd. But over the following two weeks they kept catching themselves asking the same question: what if? Each time they turned the idea over, it opened rather than closed. So they said yes — not as a plan, but as a decision. The money came from a small Shanghai apartment they had just sold.

The intention at first was modest: keep the houses running as they were, and invite people doing hard service work in Kenya — pastors, aid workers, mission pilots — to stay for nothing, for as long as they needed. The word restore was there from the beginning.

Then the hyenas came. This is not a metaphor: the perimeter fence had holes in it, and at night hyenas came through and got into the rubbish. The obvious thing was to fix the fence. What happened instead set the pattern for everything since.

Tim had an idea. Kasarani had many young people with no work and no clear path to any. What if the fence became a wall, and the wall became a reason to employ them — not as labour, but as apprentices, learning a real craft while they earned? Eileen Neylan, a landscape designer then on site for a small planting job, had built in dry stone before and knew it would hold here. So the stones were dug from the property itself, a master artisan came from Elementaita to teach, and the wall went up by hand. For years afterwards, Tim met each apprentice in person every Saturday, talking through their lives.

The same logic produced the buried rainwater tanks: the property needed water security, the dig was enormous, and the dig was also work. Walls and tanks alike were employment dressed as infrastructure. They became the structural signature of the estate.

A Kenyan landscape designer of thirty-eight years' standing — a farmer's daughter from the Highlands, who decided at eighteen, in a garden in Kericho, that making places like it would be her life's work — Eileen had been hired to replace some flowers that died after the property changed hands. On her first walk-through, asked for her honest opinion, she said the buildings should probably be knocked down. Josh said he wouldn't go that far.

What followed was a full occupation. She designed every garden bed — some five thousand plants by her own count, possibly twice that. She brought a master woodworker from Gilgil, who went on to make every wooden door, gate and cabinet on the property in mahogany and cypress. She brought plasterers from the coast, who taught the apprentices a sage-green plaster technique none of them had tried. She drew the watercolour leleshwa in the estate's wordmark from a plant in her own garden.

She is also the reason the kitchen has its own farm. Some way into the project, Josh came upon a greenhouse he didn't know they had and asked Eileen what it was. The grow house, she told him — part of the farm-to-table strategy, with a fish pond for the tilapia. Josh asked when they had decided to have a farm-to-table strategy. Eileen explained, kindly, that they had.

Read the gardens →

Joseph Kimani had been brought in to fix some rotten beams. He stayed to mentor more than fifty Kasarani apprentices through every craft the buildings would require — masonry, carpentry, metalwork, finishes — quiet, patient, willing to demolish a wall the day after he built it because Eileen had thought of something better. He still maintains the property he built.

None of it grew from bare earth. Annalyn had built the place with her late husband over twenty years — the houses, the mature trees, the shape of the hill — and what she handed on was less a property than a life's work in need of a next chapter. Cleo and Josh have treated the purchase that way ever since: not an acquisition, a stewardship.

The villas came together out of order. O'Lorien opened first, while the other two were still being redrawn to serve guests without losing what was already there. O'Leleshwa came next — the longest rebuild, the largest of the three. O'Lerai was last, shaped around its deck and the view the deck holds.

Nothing arrived by the container. The long tables, desks and benches were drawn by hand on graph paper and cut live-edge from local timber, each piece made for the room it sits in.

The villas →

There is a piece of that sage-green plasterwork in O'Leleshwa Villa that Josh has never quite seen: he is red-green colourblind, and no one thought to tell him the colour until the wall was finished. The technique was Eileen's; the hands were the apprentices'; the wall is theirs more than his. That is roughly how the whole estate was built.

The apprentices who raised the walls did not disperse when the building stopped. Some are on staff today; others have moved on into careers across Kenya's hospitality industry, which was always the point — the apprenticeship exists to launch its graduates, not to keep them.

Jenetta Barry, who has known Lake Naivasha for sixty years, stepped in to help during the rebuild and never left. She is the General Manager now, and the first person a guest meets on arrival; the warmth of the team around her is her doing.