SOL KERZNER31 JUL 2026The hotel that built Sol KerznerDelve into the untold story of The Beverly Hills Hotel in uMhlanga, South Africa’s first five-star graded hotel and the pioneering project that launched Sol Kerzner’s legendary…Ash Müller6 min read

I’ve been reading Peter Venison’s biography of Sol Kerzner, SOL: My Friend and Adversary. One chapter specifically made me go down a research rabbit hole. For those guessing Sun City or Atlantis — The Palm in Dubai, it’s neither.

Rather, it was about South Africa’s first five-star graded hotel, which was also the first hotel Kerzner developed. The small peach-pink hotel on a cliff in uMhlanga,KwaZulu-Natal. If you grew up anywhere near Durban, The Beverly Hills is part of the furniture.

It’s the building between the pier and the lighthouse. I’m not going to retell the book — go buy it; it’s a good read. Almost everything that later made Kerzner into Kerzner is sitting there in this one small salmon building, in three decisions he made before a brick was laid.

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Where he built it (basically selecting this spot as a prime-time tourist destination way before its time), what he did before he built it and how he opened it. In the early 1960s there was one obvious place to put a hotel in this part of the world — Durban’s Marine Parade. The elegant little Edward Hotel had been trading there for years and the boarding houses filled every time the Highveld emptied itself onto the beach.

uMhlanga, its name means “place of reeds”, in isiZulu, was 17km further up the coast and undeveloped. Here’s the part I love, because it’s so much less romantic than the legend. Kerzner didn’t choose uMhlanga because he saw the future.

He chose it because he couldn’t afford the Parade. But the book also emphasises that even if he’d had the money, it would have been one hotel too many on the Parade. In uMhlanga he was taking a risk on the location but he’d be one of the only ones taking it.

Kerzner, who had zero experience in the hospitality sector and hotel development, raised the money the way a good accountant would. His backers were the directors he’d impressed with his head for figures and the banks he knew through his audit firm. Instead of handing the money straight to architects, he took much of his own stake and spent it on a plane ticket. I can only imagine what his backers made of that.

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