Our Founders
CELEBRATED INDUSTRY VETERANS
“We’re Andy & Sonja and we’ve been building and running safari lodges and tented camps in Zimbabwe and Kenya for the last forty years. In 2007 we decided to settle down and we built The Safari Cottages; our home in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy where you can experience an unrivalled safari holiday.”
Sonja is a jack of all trades but most famously, an absolute whizz in the kitchen; she trains all our chefs and handles menus, food supplies, guest requests and makes sure we are all well fed and watered. She has an impeccable eye for design and loves to support local artisans; she has handpicked every single plant, curtain and wine glass in The Safari Cottages. You won’t see a single IKEA label anywhere!
Andy is a renowned camp manager and professional safari guide who, even though he’s most at home under a tarp in the bush, he handles the day to day maintenance of the buildings and vehicles, guide training, administration and logistics. Pull up a chair around the fire with him and you’ll find Andy is a wealth of safari stories and a walking encyclopedia of knowledge on Africa’s flora and fauna, history and more.
Our Values
EQUALITY, EDUCATION & ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION
EDUCATION & EQUALITY
As a family owned and run company it’s important to us that our staff feel like family too and that they feel supported. Here’s how we’re supporting our team and promoting workplace equality:
Our staff are housed in a spacious camp and provided with all the facilities and comforts of home.
In quiet times we host staff game drives, parties and volleyball matches (which we invite guests to join too).
We are consistently training and promoting in-house. That’s how our dishwashing team become servers and our servers become head chefs or trainee guides.
We welcome both women and men to work with us. Unlike so many camps, that only provide facilities for men to live and work on site, we want to support women in the workforce and currently employ female chefs, servers and cleaners.
ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION
As part of our vision to turn this derelict old cattle ranch station (read more about our cattle station roots below) into a thriving home for visitors from around the world to marvel at the incredible landscapes and wilderness of Ol Pejeta we ran a single strand electric fence around the property. Our intention was to A. provide a safe space for guests to explore freely during the day and B. to restore what was once an incredible grove of yellow bark acacias that had been decimated by cattle and elephants.
We also wrapped nearby acacia trees in wire, to protect them from damage from elephants and give them (and the wildlife that depend on them) a fighting chance. Today, our property is an emerging, emerald forest of acacia trees that provide a sanctuary to a cacophony of birdlife, insects, small mammals and more.
It’s easy to see where the fence line is, isn’t it
NON-NEGOTIABLES
We don’t want to harp on about all our eco-friendly practices because, in our eyes, these are (or should be) basic requirements that all properties should all adhere to. But just so you have no doubts, here’s an overview of our non-negotiable eco-practices:
no single-use plastics: we use refillable stainless steel, glass or recycled plastic (even our drinking glasses are recycled cider or gin bottles)
we run on solar power electricity with a back up generator
we use borehole water pumped directly from our site
our produce is sourced from our own garden or from local growers or providers and beef from Ol Pejeta Ranch
with the exception of our assistant manager we employ Kenyans only
our interiors are predominantly hand crafted by local artisans, with only a few pieces sourced from no further than Nairobi
we support a women’s charity in Nanyuki called Spinners & Weavers whom we recommend you visit during your stay
Our roots
leaving only footprints
The site of The Safari Cottages is actually located on an old cattle ranch and so, in order to avoid adding another footprint to the land Andy and Sonja chose this site to repurpose it from it’s original form into what it is today. Central to the cattle ranch was an old cattle ranchers’s house. It was completely run down and entirely unliveable but they striped it down and turned it into something beautiful - the windows found their way into Andy & Sonja’s house and the safari cottage kitchens, and all of the old wood (which was 80% of the building) was given a new lease of life as furniture for Cottage Tatu. In fact, nearly all of the furniture in Tatu is up-cycled from the the rancher’s house!
Following our “leave-only-footprints” approach, when we built the safari cottages, we used concrete pillars to mount the foundation on, instead of laying thick foundation slabs into the soil. This minimises disturbance to the ground and means, should we need to (but we wouldn’t want to) dismantle it all, only a few holes in the ground would remain.
