21/09/2020
Melvin Residence Guest House has stopped operations.
Elize and I bought this lovely property 18 years ago. It was in a desperate state when we bought it, we renovated it over a period of roughly 4 years. We did all the work ourselves.
The buildings on the property consists of the main residence and an outside annex that was originally built as a boarding house. The boarding house consisted of 10 rooms and 2 communal bathrooms.
12 years ago, we decided to convert the boarding house into guest rooms with en-suite facilities.
After a lot of alterations and renovations the guest room annex was ready for guest accommodation. Elize made all the linen (400 thread percale), and the curtains. She also did the decoration, and garden layout. I supervised the building and alterations and did all the woodwork.
We received a 4-star grading from the Tourism Grading Council of South Africa after their first inspection.
We successfully ran the guest house for a period of 11 years.
During the past 11 years:
• We welcomed 7,267 guests that spent a total of 11,986 nights at our facility.
• Guests from 87 nationalities stayed with us.
• We were awarded TripAdvisor’s certificate of excellence for 7 contiguous years.
• We are rated #12 of 444 establishments in Pretoria by TripAdvisor
• We received a rating of 94% from Booking.com
- Our FaceBook page has 504 likes.
Then 2020 with all its challenges hit us.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused havoc with our small business. The lock-down forced us to put our business on hold. This resulted in us receiving lots of cancellations.
With unlikely business recovery, compounded by some personal challenges, I decided to close our business.
