‘We’re all here to take selfies’: Inside the holiday villa built for influencers
I am sprawled on the bed under my phone, taking a rather unsuccessful selfie. Apparently there is an art to it. If not an art, a specific skill, one that has spawned more YouTube videos and online tips than anyone sensible should have time for. It probably helps not to immediately wonder why on god’s green earth your smartphone is making you look worse than your passport photo, and whether that horrid hodgepodge is actually you.
Which is partly why I start upright, embarrassed, when the girl wearing a pattern remarkably similar to the wall paper walks in. “It’s fine,” she says waving a hand at me as she heads straight for one of the two full-length mirrors surrounded by stuck-on butterflies. “We’re all here to take selfies.” She picks at a strand of hair, pats the crown, then positions her phone expertly – held low, low as the arm can go. She gazes at her reflection, all wide-eyed ingénue, as if the hand holding the phone belongs to some other: the voyeur perhaps. Or better still, the storyteller, Ovid to her Narcissus.
Through the windows, three women pose next to the bright blue of the pool. Orange polka- dot swimming rings float above a painting of the red lips that are trademark Modern American Glamour, but it’s the Lion’s Head backdrop that’s rocking it for the influencers; that, and the bright yellow cushions and vintage loungers that could be straight from Slim Aarons’ Poolside Gossip, the man who made an entire career out of what he called “photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places”.
In the lounge a lady in a cerise one-piece is kneeling back-to-front on the armchair upholstered in yellow polka-dot velour. She rests her face on her hands, smiling above the red-lipped mouth with “S-H-I-T” scrawled across the teeth. Someone is taking a photograph of a woman who is taking a photograph of a woman taking a photograph of herself.
Welcome to the metaverse: The Bohoho on a Friday evening, where a group of content creators are drinking Moscow Mules and margaritas on a perfect summer day in Cape Town.
“The house is made for a photoshoot.” Daniela Gottschalk, shaggy-haired owner and creator of The Bohoho wears a slinky blue dress that brings out the intensity of her kohl-lined eyes. “I’m not interested in minimalist. Hygge is not my vibe. I wanted a place that would inspire, that can make you feel fabulous. That will give people the freedom to express themselves.”
A woman in a Pucci-style pant-suit has moved to the hallway where she is holding a dial-up phone next to the life-sized leopard ornaent. “A playful place, where you can have fun.”
Gottschalk, who still owns the bar she opened in Frankfurt a decade ago, speaks with an ebullience that is as contagious as her design ethos. “Other people like to say, ‘Oh I always wanted to open a bar.’ I never wanted to open a bar! It was just an opportunity that came my way.” Similarly so the decision to become a therapist. “If you are behind the bar, people want
to tell you all their problems. I thought, okay, I’m not listening to all that for the price of a drink.” She grins. “So I became a psychotherapist.”
After a house project in Croatia, Gottschalk realised that what she really wanted was to design interiors. Having fallen in love with Cape Town, she knew where she wanted to do it, and exactly what she wanted it to look like. “I wanted to create a look like Palm Springs in the 1960s. Somewhere Jonathan Adler might want to stay. Almost everything you see here I started collecting years ago, and stored in a garage in Frankfurt. I just had to find the house.”
In 2023 Gottschalk found what she was looking for. Aside from a few mid-century elements, like the breeze blocks (now painted white), the house itself didn’t hold much aesthetic promise, but Gottschalk could see the potential. “The family had made no changes since it was built in the 1960s. I could see how to open up the spaces and how the individual furniture pieces I’d collected would work. By now I even had furniture waiting in Cape Town. I called the shop and said, ‘I finally have the house, ha, now you can deliver!’ When the container from Germany finally cleared customs I only had five days left before my visa ran out. But I had designed it in my mind. I knew where everything had to go, and it turned out exactly how I imagined.”
Blame it on the Moscow mules but I think the influencers are under the influence. In the lounge Pucci Pantsuit is taking a selfie with an object I last saw in the kitchen – glossy plastic lips biting into a Bitcoin – clenched between her teeth. I’m considering a selfie next to a rug that says “MY ROOM MY RULES”. A man dressed in matching trouser suit walks past. “Did you get it?” he asks, mock earnest, and we laugh like drains.
“Vibe” is a word Gottschalk – who incidentally specialises in family constellation therapy – uses a lot. And good vibes is what she injects – fun, funky, life-affirming vibes. It’s not just the humour, the whimsy, the amped patterns and colours. Every piece is carefully considered. Intensely loved. Like The Velveteen Rabbit, these elements combine to make fabulousness feel
rather more real than the humdrum dreary drudgery of routine life. And isn’t that just what a holiday should do?
