Is Cardamom House In Vipingo The Best Beach Hotel In Kenya?

I stayed six nights at Cardamom House in Kenya, hosted by Secluded Africa and Audley Travel. All thoughts and opinions are my own – I genuinely loved this place so much that I extended my stay. No one told me what to write and I do not accept hosted trips or payment in exchange for positive reviews. No AI was used to write this post so apologies if you find any typos!

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You know that thing where you discover somewhere so delightful, so perfect, that you want to tell the world how brilliant it is – but also keep it a secret?

Whether it’s a café that does the best brownies, a shop that has gorgeous clothes in exactly my size, or a stunning hotel, I’m always torn. I want to sing its praises so the owners get the credit they deserve and their business does well, but I also want to keep it to myself so other people don’t come and ruin it.

In this case, that ‘somewhere’ is Cardamom House.

So before we go any further, promise me something, yeah? Everything you read here is just between us. Our secret magical place. Cool?

Introducing Cardamom House

Cardamom House is a luxury boutique hotel on the coast at Kuruwitu, which is near a town called Vipingo, about an hour’s drive north of Mombasa.

The property, which comprises three villas and a fairytale pink tower surrounded by fragrant tropical gardens, sits atop ancient coral cliffs overlooking a white sandy beach that spills into the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean.

With just ten suites – each with its own private veranda – plus a dozen or more roof terraces, shady garden seating areas, poolside loungers, private dining spaces and quiet corners, it’s possible to spend days here and feel like the king or queen of your own tropical island paradise.

I know the expression ‘hidden gem’ is bandied about excessively, but trust me, when it comes to Cardamom House, there really is no better description.

Why is Cardamom House special?

What makes Cardamom House so lovely is that it’s not an investment totted up by a bunch of millionaire venture capitalists with dollar signs in their eyes; nor is it the latest in a string of flat-pack resorts belonging to a huge international hotel chain.

Cardamom House is a family hotel belonging to Austrian-born travel company executive Mario Enzesberger, and his wife Gill, from South Africa. The couple, along with their son Mario Junior, used to live here before moving to another home nearby, from where they now visit regularly to greet guests and make sure everything is running smoothly.

It’s one of four properties managed by Secluded Africa, a small safari and lodge company whose focus is not only on ensuring that guests enjoy relaxed, quiet luxury, but also on sustainable, responsible tourism that empowers and gives back to local communities.

It’s this personal, ethically-driven ethos, and the love and care the team pours into every detail, that really makes Cardamom House so special.

The history of Cardamom House in Kenya

Over lunch with a sea view, Gill tells me how Cardamom House came about.

“Mario owned it before I met him,” she says. “He’d had it for 17 years and it was totally run down – this big old colonial property with three villas side by side, full of cracked beams and asbestos. After we got married, we’d come and stay here, sometimes for three months at a time, but eventually we decided we wanted to move here permanently, so we needed to do it up.”

They found a local architect and drew up plans to create a family home with a few guest rooms on the side. And then Covid struck.

“We ended up stuck here,” Gill said. “Which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we could really just get on with it. We had to demolish everything and rebuild, but we did it really quickly because Covid kept us in one place and there were loads of people around to help.”

Over the course of the next year, they demolished the original properties and rebuilt them in a coastal Swahili style, with thick walls to keep the heat out during the day, breezy open-sided terraces, pergolas dripping with pink and purple bougainvillea, and beautiful African art pieces all hand-selected by Gill.

“We wanted a home and guest house…” she grins, showing dazzling white teeth. “And somehow we’ve ended up with a boutique hotel that we don’t even live in anymore!”

The rooms at Cardamom House

The four buildings at Cardamom House each contain just a couple of guest rooms, making every one feel private and spacious.

The main villa is called Manda Toto. Here you’ll find the reception, a colourful bar, indoor and outdoor dining and comfy seating areas, the pool, and upstairs there are two penthouse suites with an interconnecting terrace, a private kitchen and dining area, and sea views.

The two smaller villas are called Lulu and Shela. Villa Lulu has one suite with a private garden terrace, and Villa Shela has one ground floor and one first floor suite.

The final building is the famous pink tower, which has three floors, each with a single suite, and at the very top an incredible roof terrace with 360 panoramic views of the nearby village on one side, and the Indian Ocean on the other.

All the rooms are huge and beautiful, with gorgeous bathrooms with hot showers and double basins, private balconies with sea views, romantic four-poster beds with mosquito nets, air-conditioning and ceiling fans, Wi-Fi, and individually-designed African and Arabian-style art and décor.

The gardens at Cardamom House

Cardamom House is surrounded on all sides with fragrant tropical gardens, bursting with colourful flowers and palm trees. You can wander along the pathways or find a colourful sofa to sit and read your book to the sounds of tinkling water features or chirping frogs (who can be a bit noisy at night, so bring ear plugs if you’re a light sleeper!).

I also spotted monkeys and various colourful African birds in the gardens. These guys will steal food if you leave it out on the balcony – but don’t worry, they don’t come into the rooms.

Read more: 46 Amazing African Safari Animals – A Photo Guide

Design at Cardamom House

I want to back up and talk a bit more about that, because one of the things that really stood out for me at Cardamom House was the thought, effort and passion that had clearly gone into the décor.

I’ve been lucky to stay in quite a few very nice hotels, but I’ve never been anywhere that felt so unique and creative in its use of colour and design. From the overall Swahili and Kenyan coastal style of the buildings themselves, to the details of furniture and soft furnishings, it’s clear that Gill and Mario have put a lot of love, thought and money into turning Cardamom House into a work of art.

In the entrance hall, in the lobby, and even in one of the bathrooms, there are trees growing through the building. Rather than take the easy route and cut them down, Mario and Gill decided to save them.

“We wanted the trees to stay, to keep this peaceful, tropical feel,” Gill told me. “It needed to look like the house was here for a long time and they grew around it.”

Other details jumped out at me as I wandered around: the hand-made brass lamps made by a local artist in Mombasa, the life-sized metal ‘askari’ (Kenyan guards) that stand outside each room; hanging lanterns made from gold-painted baobab seeds, a staircase embedded with shells, hand-carved wooden lattice windows made by a local carpenter, and colourful paintings by local artists hanging in every room.

“All the art is for sale,” Gill explains. “If anyone wants to buy something, we pass the money back to the artist.”

Much of the furniture, including the large main dining table, is made from wood reclaimed from an old dhow (a traditional wooden fishing boat), which they brought from Lamu Island in the north of Kenya. “It came on a massive truck,” Gill remembers, “and it smelled of fish!”

Today, the name plaque from the boat hangs above the door in the entrance hall.

Facilities at Cardamom House Vipingo

As well as the beautiful rooms and gorgeous artworks, Cardamom House offers all the usual amenities you’d expect from a luxury boutique hotel:

Pool and loungers: If swimming in the sea isn’t your thing, Cardamom House also has a lovely turquoise swimming pool with sea views. It’s bordered on one side by a pergola draped with bougainvillea flowers which shades a row of pink sun loungers, perfect for an afternoon dip followed by a snooze, and if you ask nicely the bar staff will even bring you a drink while you relax.

Wi-Fi: There’s good wifi throughout the property, in the rooms as well as in the main areas.

Air-Con: All the rooms have air conditioning and fans. The dining areas don’t as they’re open to the sea breezes and views.

Laundry: Rooms have a laundry basket where you can leave your clothes to be washed.

Personal Trainer: Cardamom House doesn’t have a gym; it goes one better! In-house personal trainer Hamadi is a fully qualified fitness instructor and former taekwondo and kickboxing champion, and can be booked at any time you like to put you through your paces. During my stay we did step aerobics, HIIT, boxing, weights and more, and doing all this on a terrace with views of the Indian Ocean meant I barely noticed the effort!

Massages: Hamadi is also a trained massage therapist, so after he’s worked you hard, he can also help restore you! But don’t worry, you don’t have to do the workout first – there’ll be no judgement if you want to skip straight to the massage.

Dogs: OK, maybe this isn’t your typical boutique hotel facility, but I can’t go much further without mentioning that Cardamom House has two large dogs: Rhodesian Ridgebacks Sissi and Franz.

I was a bit apprehensive about them as I’m not really a dog person, but I can honestly say they are among the most chilled dogs I’ve ever met. They wander quietly around the gardens and laze in shady corners and are no trouble at all. However, if you do have a problem with dogs, you can just tell the staff and Sissi and Franz will be shut away for the duration of your stay.

The beach at Cardamom House

Cardamom House overlooks a stretch of pristine sandy beach, which is blocked off at either end by rocks jutting out into the sea. This means you can’t walk along it from other hotels or resorts, and while not officially private, it might as well be – in my six nights staying there I think I saw maybe three or four other people in total.

It’s nothing like Diani Beach – the enormous and very popular stretch of white beach south of Mombasa that’s lined with resorts and hotels. Here you are guaranteed to get hassle from the infamous ‘beach boys’ salesmen, but at Cardamom House the only people you’ll see are occasional fishermen and other locals from the nearby village.

At high tide you can take a dip in the warm Indian Ocean, and when the tide goes out it leaves behind a huge area of rock pools that are great for exploring.

If you like beaches but also enjoy your privacy and don’t want to share with hundreds of other holidaymakers, Cardamom House is for you.

Ready to book Cardamom House? Click here to find out more.

Food at Cardamom House Kenya

As if all this wasn’t enough, there’s one other aspect of Cardamom House that makes it genuinely special – and that’s the amazing kitchen team.

In a move designed to empower more women in the local area, Mario and Gill hired an all-female team of chefs, led by star head chef Zuzu Mohamed.

“Around here many girls get pregnant at 14 and they can’t support themselves,” Gill told me. “And the safari industry is really male-dominated, so we made a conscious decision to give more opportunities to local women.”

Zuzu comes from Lamu Island – the same place as the dhow – and had no experience as a head chef before joining the Cardamom House team. But she’s creative, talented and a fast learner, and enjoys getting inspiration from the celebrity chef recipe books that Gill brings her from her trips to Europe.

All the food is freshly prepared in-house and menus can be adapted to suit all dietary requirements. The emphasis is on colourful and healthy dishes made with locally-sourced ingredients, in a fusion of Swahili and western styles.

Given its seafront location, seafood and fish feature often – fishermen even come to sell their catch directly to Cardamom House. The day before I arrived three men turned up at the door with a 36 kg tuna – Mario shows me a photo of them holding it up.

It arrived on my plate at lunch the following day, thick chunks perfectly seared with salad, noodles and soy and ginger sauce.

Meals can be served at any time you like, anywhere you like. There are 14 idyllic dining spots so you’re really spoiled for choice – from a private breakfast set up on your veranda to lunch on one of the terraces overlooking the ocean, to sundowner cocktails with nibbles at the top of the pink tower, you’ll never get bored!

Staff at Cardamom House in Vipingo

As well as the kitchen team, almost the entire housekeeping, grounds, security and front of house staff have been hired from nearby villages, with little to no hospitality experience.

When they started, many of them knew nothing about how to work in a hotel and Gill had to teach them, from scratch, everything they needed to know about how to cater to western guests.

It does mean that sometimes you may need to be a bit patient with them as they don’t always get everything right first time. But they are very keen to help and willing to learn, and it’s a wonderful feeling to know that the cost of your holiday is helping to give back to the local community and give opportunities and an education to people who wouldn’t have had any other chances in life.

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Things to do at Cardamom House

It’s entirely possible to spend a week at Cardamom House doing absolutely nothing apart from reading, swimming, eating and sleeping.

But if, like me, you like to explore and make the most of being in a new place, here are some of the things you can do during your stay.

Visit the local village

If you’d like to stretch your legs and see a bit of the local area, one of the staff can take you for a walk into the nearby village, Kibaoni, to see how the locals live and meet some of the community.

Go snorkelling or do a beach walk

At high tide, local guide Ibrahim can take you snorkelling to nearby coral reefs teeming with brightly-coloured fish, or at low tide you can do a beach walk along the exposed areas of rock pools and sandbanks.

I loved splashing through the shallows looking at the beached boats and all the little creatures trapped in the pools, from menacing sea urchins to tiny little fish. I even saw a puffer fish!

Masks and snorkels, and water shoes to protect your feet from sea urchin spines, are provided.

Visit Vipingo Ridge private estate and golf course

Just ten minutes’ drive away from Cardamom House, Vipingo Ridge is a gated private estate that’s home to Africa’s only PGA-accredited, par-72, 18-hole championship golf course.

This is a golf-course with a difference: Vipingo Ridge also has a wildlife sanctuary and the animals are free to roam, so you may find zebras, elands or one of the site’s three hand-reared orphan giraffes grazing at the ninth hole. But don’t worry, the animals are pretty friendly and there are no predators here.

There’s also a clubhouse with a café, and a restaurant and bar. If you want to stay longer, there are accommodation rental options up here too – but personally I’d recommend heading back down to Cardamom House.

Fun fact: Vipingo Ridge is where King Charles and Queen Camilla stayed on their 2023 state visit to Kenya, just a day after I visited myself. So this place is fit for a King!

Chill out at Ocean Life Beach Club

Although Vipingo Ridge itself is not right on the coast, they have their own beach club at Kuruwitu Beach, just a few minutes’ drive down the road from Cardamom House.

There’s a gorgeous stretch of white beach, and a bar and restaurant where you can chill out for the day, go swimming, snorkelling, kayaking or paddleboarding, or simply soak up the glorious Kenyan sun.

For the more adventurous, they even offer skydiving trips with Go Jump Kenya. I didn’t do this as I skydived in New Zealand and once was enough for me!

Visit Oceans Alive and the Kuruwitu Conservation Zone

Another place that’s definitely worth checking out is the Oceans Alive project at Kuruwitu Beach – which is so important that it was visited by King Charles and Queen Camilla during their recent stay.

Kuriwitu Beach sits in the Kuruwitu Conservation area, which was set up 10 years ago and was Kenya’s first ever managed Marine Protected Area.

At that time, overfishing had become a huge problem, and local fishermen were struggling to catch enough to support their families. So they decided to establish a 30-hectare no-fishing zone, which is managed and monitored. Here they leave the fish alone to breed, which helps to repopulate the other nearby areas where fishing is still allowed.

They also manage 12 km of coastline, with beach clean-ups, an education programme to teach local students how to take care of the environment, a turtle nesting site protection programme, and a coral restoration project.

Here you can meet coral conservation expert and guide Katana Ngala, who shows you how they do coral gardening – creating new coral ‘seedlings’ in underwater nurseries and then ‘planting’ them into man-made coral reefs just offshore.

Doing this rebuilds the coral ecosystem, enhances biodiversity, and helps to safeguard the livelihoods of the local community.

Once you’ve learned about the process, Katana will take you snorkelling to see their amazing work in progress and the many baby corals they’ve already put into the ocean.

For me it was fascinating to swim through the brightly-coloured coral garden, admiring both new baby corals and the mature healthy ones, and watching the hundreds of tiny colourful fish that have made the reef their home.

Secluded Africa and the Secluded Trust

If you’re not already convinced to book your stay at Cardamom House (and if not, why on earth not?!) then let me tell you about one other important thing that I think really makes this place so special.

You’ve probably already got the gist that Mario and Gill and the team at Secluded Africa really try to put people before profit and give back to the communities they’re part of. And this is where you come in.

The price of your stay includes a $60 a day conservation fee, which goes directly to the Secluded Africa Wildlife and Community Trust, Secluded’s non-profit arm.

This fee, plus more from generous donors, goes towards community and wildlife conservation projects in the areas around Secluded’s four properties.

This includes supporting the Oceans Alive project, paying school fees for dozens of local kids, local infrastructure projects like supplying water tanks or fixing drains, emergency medical care and food drives in times of trouble, filling waterholes, patrolling for poachers and removing snares, and much, much more.

So not only do you get to have an amazing holiday, but you can also relax with the warm fuzzy feeling that by being in Kenya, you are actually helping to improve people’s lives. Now that’s what I call a win-win.

How to get to Cardamom House in Kenya

There are a few ways to get to Cardamom House:

By car: It’s easy enough to drive – Cardamom House is just off the main Nairobi-Mombasa highway so you can reach it from Nairobi in nine hours or Mombasa in about 75 minutes.

By train: Since that’s a long old drive, if you’re coming from Nairobi I’d recommend doing what I did and getting the train. You can leave Nairobi main train station in the morning and reach the nearest station – Mariakani – in about 6 hours. Cardamom House will send a driver to pick you up from the station.

By plane: If you prefer to fly, there’s a small airstrip up at Vipingo Ridge. Safarilink run flights from there to Nairobi’s Wilson airport, which take about an hour.

Read more: What To Wear On Safari: My Detailed Safari Packing List With Photos

The Secluded Africa itinerary

But by far the easiest way to get to Cardamom House is to put yourself entirely into the very capable hands of the team at Secluded Africa. Why not stay at a couple of their other properties for the full Kenya experience?

As well as Cardamom House they have:

• Instinct of the Mara in the Olderkesi Conservancy in the Maasai Mara
• Kipalo Hills in Tsavo West.
• Delta Dunes in the Tana Delta (currently closed)

You could spend three nights in the Mara, three nights at Kipalo and three nights at Cardamom House for a truly incredible 10-day Kenya safari and beach holiday.

Read more: Instinct of the Mara Review: Exclusive Wildlife In Kenya

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Where to next?

If you enjoyed this, why not check out some of my other Africa and wildlife posts?

• What To Wear On Safari: My Detailed Safari Packing List With Photos
• Ethical Travel Photography: How To Capture With A Conscience
• A Magical Trip Whale Watching in Mirissa, Sri Lanka
• Nature Vacations: 25 Amazing Places For An Outdoors Adventure
• Chobe Safari Lodge In Botswana: A Complete Review With Photos
• Alphonse Island Seychelles: A Review Of My Week In Paradise

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