Life & Work

Promise of royal treatment at Kisumu’s new, swanky hotel

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Lake-facing room at Sovereign Hotel. Courtesy.

For a brief moment there, James McTough (that unusual surname belonged to his late dad who was from Aberdeen, Scotland) wondered what he would do with this property sitting on one hectare near Lake Victoria. Actually, it sits right opposite Nyanza Club, in the leafier part of Milimani Estate in Kisumu.

The Victorian house, complete with balconies that stared into the lake, was being rented by an American Embassy staff and when their lease ended, McTough thought, why not build a swanky boutique hotel?

That was a year or so ago when Kisumu – tired of the same old hotel fare – was experiencing a sort of renaissance with the entrance of hotels like the Vic Hotel, a bed and breakfast angling towards the business travellers, Impala Eco-Lodge, for the more touristy fare, Kiboko Bay Resort and a scattering of small boutique hotels in the town.

Kisumu was rising up to be counted.

Executive suite

McTough, an engineer, looked at the six-bedroomed mansion and thought that maybe he could change it into something that people would appreciate as befitting the status of the address it stood on.

It would mean knocking down a few walls, building a few windows, creating new rooms on the north-facing end of the property and doing something around the swimming pool in the backyard. Stuff that engineers don’t lose sleep over.

But it would have been an ugly hotel, he knew, and cutting corners isn’t his thing. “So he decided to bring down the whole building, and build a new one in its place,” says Irene Van Laarhoven, a director of the hotel and McTough’s wife.

So for four years, they built the 32-roomed hotel; one executive suite covering 120 square metres, spread over two levels with the bedroom and bathroom taking up the entire second level. Then there were three luxurious apartments covering 150 square metres for those who might want a more homely feel.

The last category of rooms were the luxury rooms, which have the superior rooms with a lake view and standard rooms with a garden view. I don’t have to tell you to put your money on the superior rooms.

They also built a conference room that can accommodate about 120 people. In April last year, they opened their doors after calling it grandly, Sovereign. But why?

Culture

“Because it’s supreme, because we offer luxury and this is one of the best hotels in the region,” explained McTough.

Because the bulk of the clientele at the hotel are embassy and NGO staffers, the hotel decided to build a sushi and tepanyaki kitchen and enticed Issac Malungu from Nairobi’s Misono Japanese restaurant to run it.

He also set up a tepanyaki menu and trained five staff members to muster that cuisine. Even though the hotel hosts a lot of local room guests, the restaurant, unsurprisingly, mostly sees caucasian diners.

The whole sushi cuisine hasn’t picked with the locals who, I pointedly joke with Irene, just doesn’t see how someone would eat raw fish.

They are building a wood-fired oven out back by the swimming pool to make pizza. Maybe that will appeal to those who are sceptical about raw fish.

And to spice things up, they are also building a Moroccan lounge by the pool where guests will smoke shisha as Arabian music wafts in the air.

Though tourism at the coast is on its knees, Kisumu is raking in business. The hotel, for instance, was at over 70 per cent bed occupation. And perhaps it’s this confidence in Kisumu that has seen Java open a branch there while Simba Colt is allegedly building a hotel at the new Westend mall.

Obviously Sovereign is trying to set a new culture in Kisumu. Which is great, but it still begs a question, which I posed to Irene: What is the soul of Sovereign because everybody is selling a bed and a warm meal?

She explained it in that generic hotel lingo that hoteliers love to use. That which is peppered with words like “luxury,” “homely”, “unmatched”, “quality” “leisure”, which won’t mean much to you until you stand at the balcony of one of the superior rooms with a view of the lake and watch the sun set in the hills beyond the lake.

That spectacular image is a big part of Sovereign’s soul and it changes with the weather – and your disposition.