About Us

The Cape Letting Journal is an editorial magazine covering luxury self-catering accommodation across Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula, and the wider Western Cape. We write for travellers who care about light, place, and a properly considered house — and who choose a villa not by star rating but by the way it sits on its slope.

The magazine was founded in 2024 by Sarah Mitchell, a former property journalist who spent a decade writing about coastal real estate before turning the same eye to letting. The brief from the start has been small and deliberate: cover only the postcodes and the kinds of houses we would book ourselves, write in the voice of a friend who has actually stayed there, and never accept a brief that requires us to soften an opinion.

What we cover

Our beat is the luxury self-catering villa in its Cape context — Atlantic Seaboard, False Bay, the Hout Bay basin, the winelands, and the long coastline that runs east towards Hermanus and the whale coast. We publish editorial features on architecture, interiors, and design; travel guides for the families, the couples, and the regulars who already know they want a house rather than a hotel; and slow reads on the wider villa-living culture as it shifts.

We do not publish hotel reviews. We do not publish package tours. And we do not list our own inventory — the magazine is editorial, not transactional. Where a house is mentioned by name, it is because it earned the mention.

Our editorial line

The Cape Letting Journal is independent. We commission writers and photographers who know the postcodes they cover, and we work to a small set of principles: write only what is true, recommend only what we would book, and never confuse a polished press release with a piece of journalism. If a feature reads like an advert, we have not done our job.

If you would like to reach the editorial desk — for tips, corrections, partnership enquiries, or just to disagree with a recent piece — you can write to [email protected]. We read everything.