Fairmont The Norfolk

The Norfolk opened on Christmas Day 1904, when Nairobi was little more than a railway depot on the line to Uganda, and the city effectively grew up around it. Its mock-Tudor frontage and famous Lord Delamere Terrace became the gathering point of the early settler era and the traditional first and last night of the great safaris; Theodore Roosevelt's 1909 expedition is among the many that assembled here. The hotel remains a living archive of Kenyan history, courtyard gardens and all.

Behind the heritage frontage, Fairmont runs a polished business-and-leisure hotel: rooms and suites around tranquil tropical courtyards, a heated pool, a well-equipped gym and spa, and standards of cooking that make the terrace as popular with Nairobi society today as a century ago. The contrast between the busy university quarter outside and the garden calm within is one of the hotel's quiet pleasures.

Most guests use the Norfolk as bookends to a safari, and it plays the role perfectly — Nairobi National Park, the Giraffe Centre and the Karen Blixen Museum are all within easy reach, and the airport run is straightforward. Central Nairobi requires the usual big-city street wisdom, and the hotel is a business address as much as a romantic one. As the place where East African travel began, it has no rival.