Africa’s most beautiful hotels are decorated with repurposed junk

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when I enter Latitude 15 in Lusaka my eye beholds the most beautiful hotel in the world. Walls pop with contemporary African art and dreamy chandeliers adorn the ceilings. Materials are organic: leather, beads, wood, mud, feathers; this is a place that vibrates with earthy personality and juicy colour.

On closer inspection, the chandeliers are not light fixtures at all - they’re cascading copper discs and clay beads and fragments of pearlescent glass held together by delicate strands of wire. These luxe ornamentations come not from the European design houses of Baccarat or Murano, but from Likoma, a pinprick-sized island on Lake Malawi. So immense is the lake, it straddles three countries: Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique; Likoma, though part of Malawi, lies just a few kilometres off the remote eastern lakeshore in Mozambique.

Here at the social enterprise Katundu, in Likoma, the largely female workforce crafts resplendent artefacts and functional furnishings from life’s detritus: wine bottles, hot water tanks, fishing boats, engine parts.

“Wine bottles we get from the [nearby] lodge, and junk we get from Lilongwe on the mainland,” says Lisa Njakale, Katundu’s general manager.

The lodge, Kaya Mawa, where I’m staying, is a dreamy lakeshore hideaway beautified with the women’s beaded cushions, driftwood furniture and glass-and-bead string curtains. Here, whitewashed suites are tucked into outcrops overlooking the beach and rockpools bristling with kaleidoscopic cichlids. The scenery expands on the boat ride to Katundu: splintered granite shoreline, arabesque-branched baobabs, coral flame trees. It’s a short climb from the dock to the thatched workshop, which sits on a hill overlooking an ocean-blue strip of Lake Malawi. Outside are baskets of seeds and broken glass, mounds of empty wine bottles and scrap metal.

Ingenuity and reinvention extends to the enterprise’s engineering methods: to make those singular glass chandeliers, the artisans sandblast the wine bottles’ shards in PVC drums filled with sand and water and powered by a system of bicycle chains and tyre rims. It takes two days to achieve the scoured effect; when the fragments emerge from the tumbler, Njakale says, “they look like beach glass”.

Other jobs are done by hand: baobab fibre and maize husks are plaited into string, beads are stitched onto cushion covers, cogs coalesce into a giant map of Africa. These objects taking shape in the balmy breeze will find their way into prestigious hotels like Tongabezi Lodge in Livingstone, Zambia, Mukima Manor House in Kenya and Chongwe House on the Lower Zambezi; they’ll be shipped to private homes on the other side of the world.

But Katundu doesn’t produce art for art’s sake. It was established in 2006 by Suzie Lightfoot, who lived on the island for 14 years when her husband, James, owned Kaya Mawa (it’s now part of Green Safari’s portfolio). The couple co-founded interior and architectural design company Drift Design, the creative force behind Kaya Mawa, the Latitude Hotel Group (which James Lightfoot also co-founded) and other African properties. Idyllic though Likoma is, much of its population suffer from poverty and unemployment. Women and single mothers are particularly disadvantaged.

Suzie Lightfoot saw an opportunity: to engage women in the design and creation of sustainable luxury items “in an ethical environment [while] respecting the environment and utilising what it has to offer”.

Today Katundu employs 30 permanent artisans, tailors, welders and carpenters, more than 75 per cent of whom are single mothers and female orphan-carers. Some of Likoma’s magic accompanies their creations to the far reaches of Africa and the world, spawning a discerning fan base. Several years after my visit, I see guests peering up appreciatively at the copper chandeliers dripping from the ceiling of Latitude 0’s lobby in Kampala. They stop to admire the tumbling glass curtains and driftwood lamp stands. And in The Works, the hotel’s meeting and workspace, they behold the coalesced cogs, which have come together to form that giant map of Africa.

THE DETAILS

TOUR
Bench Africa’s five-day Lake Malawi extension stay includes return flights from Lilongwe to Likoma Island, and accommodation at Kaya Mawa; from $4295 a person. Activities include a Katundu workshop visit. See benchafrica.com

MORE
Katundu, see katundu.com
Latitude Hotel Group, see latitudehotels.com

The writer travelled as a guest of Bench Africa.