Beta Beach Cottage

One of Cape Town’s most closely guarded secrets is the existence of little Beta Beach at Bakoven. Surrounded by clapboard bungalows, and with just one or two access points, it’s utterly idyllic. Happily for its owners, Beta Beach cottage overlooks it, the view filled with a bright, white, gently sloping sandy beach, the massive boulders that characterise this stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard and, well, on a hot day, the neighbours dogs, a couple of mooching lovers and low-swooping seagulls playing in the breeze.

The three-bedroom, three bathroom house is on two levels, and you enter it via a large living room which, with a kitchen at one end, is punctuated at the other by a sea-facing balcony that clearly, come summer, is Beta Beach’s social HQ. A large eight-seater dining table is centre stage, and at lunches or dinners it provides ringside seats from which to observe whatever’s happening on the beach below, a few feet away. To one side a flight of steps leads down to a private courtyard at beach level, onto which open two en suite bedrooms and a TV sitting room and, best of all, there’s a little private gate that leads down to the beach itself.