Where we are, and why that matters
Bredell is smallholding country on the quiet side of Kempton Park — plots rather than pavements, big trees, and enough space that you hear birds rather than traffic. It is also 8.8 km from O.R. Tambo International Airport, which is the odd and useful thing about this address. You can be at check-in in ten minutes, and still sleep somewhere that feels like the country.
That combination is why our guests are such a mixed lot. Crews and business travellers catching early flights. Families in for a wedding. Contractors on a three-month job. Couples who wanted somewhere with a garden to get married in. We have never had a single type of guest, and we have stopped trying to have one.
Two halves of the same house
Elsjes runs as a guest house and as a venue, and neither is an afterthought. There are 17 en-suite rooms on one side, and Hilgard Hall on the other, seating up to 150. Some weekends the two have nothing to do with each other. Most weekends they do — the wedding party sleeps here, comes down for breakfast, and nobody has to drive anywhere.
The thread running through both is the kitchen. Every plate that goes out, to a guest at breakfast or to a hundred and fifty people at a reception, was made here that day. We do our own baking too — the rusks with the morning coffee, the milk tarts on the dessert table. It is slower than buying it in, and it is the part of this business we are least willing to change.
Who you will deal with
Ansi van der Westhuizen runs Elsjes and answers the phone herself. If you book a wedding here, she is the person who sits down with you over the menu, who is on duty on the day, and who calls you the Tuesday after to sort out the breakage deposit. There is no events team and no account manager. For a business this size, that is a feature — you are never explaining your own wedding to a stranger.
A note on the name
You may find us listed in older places as Elsjes Country Inn. That name has been retired — we are Elsjes Guesthouse, which is also how we are registered. If you have an old brochure or an old email address for us, the phone number on it still reaches the same people it always did.
