The room where Nelson Mandela edited Long Walk to Freedom can be booked by the night. It is the Nelson Mandela Platinum Suite at the Saxon Hotel, Villas and Spa in Johannesburg: roughly 400 square meters, a king-size master suite and a guest suite, a butler’s kitchen, and a dedicated butler around the clock. Booking platforms list it at about R95,000 a night, close to $5,400. The hotel itself publishes no rate for it.
On August 28 in Zanzibar, the World Travel Awards named the Saxon Africa’s Leading Luxury Boutique Hotel for 2026, and the Platinum Suite took a second title of its own, Africa’s Leading Hotel Suite. The wins were announced in August and reported widely this week. They matter beyond the trophy shelf because of what the Saxon is. It is a private house that became a hotel without surrendering the house. Twenty-six years after Douw Steyn opened his family home to paying guests, and a year and a half after his death, the address at 36 Saxon Road in Sandhurst is still setting the standard for the continent.
Six months in 1990
Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990, after 27 years in custody, 18 of them on Robben Island. Steyn, an insurance magnate who had built the house in the early 1980s, was his friend, and Mandela came to stay. By the hotel’s account he lived there for six months, editing the autobiography that was published in 1994 as Long Walk to Freedom. The room he worked in is the suite that now carries his name.
The house kept the evidence. A gallery off the main hallway holds copies of the book in English and in many translations, along with photographs from those years. The main restaurant, Qunu, is named for the village where Mandela grew up, and it received one star at the 2026 EatOut Awards. Guests eat under his village’s name, then walk past his book on the way to bed.
A house that learned to be a hotel
Steyn converted the home in May 2000, opening with 26 suites. The property now has 53 suites spread across the main building and three private villas, set in ten acres of indigenous gardens behind gates in Sandhurst, Johannesburg’s most guarded suburb. It closed for a full refurbishment during the pandemic and reopened on May 1, 2021. The World Travel Awards have named it the World’s Leading Boutique Hotel again and again, a title the hotel says it has held in various years since 2001, most recently in 2025.
The competition is no longer only in Cape Town. At the same Zanzibar ceremony, the Park Hyatt Johannesburg was named Africa’s Leading New Hotel, a global brand planting its flag a short drive from the Saxon’s gates. Brands can build a lobby in a season. They cannot build 1990.
The first titles without the founder
Steyn died in February 2025, aged 72. The fortune behind the house came from insurance: Auto & General in South Africa, then the BGL Group in Britain, owner of Comparethemarket.com. The Saxon was his sentimental holding, and his family resisted every approach from hotel brands that wanted to manage it. Who owns and runs the property now has not been publicly detailed, which makes the 2026 awards a genuine test passed in public. The house won without the man who built it, on the strength of the history he preserved inside it.
George Cohen, the general manager, has explained the draw for years in one sentence. “Guests love coming into a private house,” he said, “particularly the one where Nelson Mandela lived for so long.”
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