As a boutique hotel, it is beautiful -- the architecture, the decor. No doubt about it. But....

RE: The hotel WIFI -- and the signal strength is "very low". VERY LOW? This is the hotel's network. Their signal ought to be "very good". I can understand that the ISP into which they feed being overloaded or otherwise unreliable, but the internal network being bad?

The hotel is several miles outside of Nairobi and be prepared to be isolated, except for the Village Market. The "shopping mall" is the cat's pajamas to the locals and pretty ho hum to me and my party. The hotel prides itself on everything that I hate about it. It is a niche, boutique hotel. Minimalist everything. Hyper modern everything. The trouble is, while some of this stuff look really neat on the cover of Architectural Digest, it is not functional in real life. There is no bathroom, but there is vanity area at one end of the room. The vanity itself is a low table in green glass; no underneath, no drawers, just space. On top of it sits a porcelain bowl, the sink. It is deep and not very wide. The water comes out of a chrome pipe that comes to the side of the bowel; there is a joystick on top to control water flow. So, every time you want to adjust the water flow, you reach over, outside the sink, and get water all over everything. Not to mention that the little joystick is not finely calibrated, so you tend to get too much or too little of whatever you want whenever you touch it. Oh yes, I looked for 24 hours to find how to close the sink stopper -- no little lever or button or pull -- you have to press on the stopper to close it, then bop it smartly to make it pop open. I really don't like plunging into the scum to open the drain, then maneuvering the joystick to clean off my hand.

One entire end of the room is the john. You enter and to your right is this ugly green vanity table with the big white sink bowl, and to the right of that is a glass wall, with the toilet proudly sitting there to be seen from all across the room. There is no tub, just a shower, with a glass partition that does not stop the shower water from splashing all over the toilet area floor and out into the sink area. I come back to the room at the end of the day feeling like a shower and ask what is worse -- being grimy until the morning, or putting up with cleaning up the bloody mess a shower makes. Grime won. At least in the morning I was able to walk away from the mess and the staff would put it right.

There is no chair except for an economic desk chair; the only way to watch the wall mounted TV is to sit on the bed. The banquette, very uncomfortable, had to serve as the luggage rack. No dresser, just a couple of very small shelves in the closet to put your undies and such.

My room overlooked the pool -- the site of the Friday evening buffet, live disco, and huge crowd. Then the Saturday night wedding party. Then the Sunday buffet with band (1000 until 1630.) LOTS of noise. As the window was broken and wouldn't shut properly, it was even worse than normal.

There are two lifts. One is fine. The other one has no lights. I reported this to management, who told me that actually, these are stars on the ceiling -- the dark and the stars are to remind me of the immensity of the African night sky. (Seriously. I couldn’t make this up.) Blank the African night sky -- I couldn't see to push the bloody buttons.

light switch on-off pads are gunmetal grey with the name of the pad ("Hall"; "Master"; "Bed") etched subtly into the plastic in -- gunmetal grey! Unless you have a flashlight and can hit the etching at an angle, you can't see the label.

Beautiful, but in the rooms, not practical.