Riva One has partnered with Hästens, the Swedish bed maker whose handmade beds now furnish Sole, Luna and Mare at the Camps Bay residence.
Riva One did not begin with a hospitality business plan. It began with circumstance, curiosity and a family’s affection for South Africa.
During the pandemic, what was meant to be time spent in the country became something longer. Unable to leave as originally planned, the family began looking at property. The search eventually led to a site in Cape Town that felt right: the right setting, the right energy and, just as importantly, the right people with whom to create it. Working with Renato, the project took shape first as a family holiday home: somewhere to return to, to share and to experience the city from a place that felt personal rather than institutional.
Opening the doors to guests came later, initially with a simple idea: when the family was not using the house, hospitality could provide some additional income. The response changed the trajectory of the project.
Guests connected with the house and with the experience around it. What had begun as a private home gradually became a business, and then something more intentional: a way of sharing the Cape Town the family itself had fallen in love with.
That means more than the postcard version of the city. Riva One’s idea of Cape Town is layered: the Atlantic air, the mountains, food, coffee, wine, art, design, local makers, different neighbourhoods and the people who give the city its character. The ambition is not to isolate guests from that sense of place, but to create a private base from which they can experience it.
Riva One remains deliberately small. With only a handful of rooms, scale is not its advantage. Attention is.
That constraint has gradually become one of its greatest freedoms. A small property can reconsider details that would be difficult to change across hundreds of rooms. It can listen, adapt and experiment. It can ask whether something that was good last season could be better next season.
For Riva One, luxury is therefore not a finished specification. It is an ongoing process of refinement.
Behind many of Riva One’s partnerships is the same recurring question: what would we genuinely appreciate if we were the guest?
It is a deceptively simple filter. The team travels, notices small details, discusses what works and what does not, and then looks at the experience at home with fresh eyes. Sometimes the improvement is immediately visible. Sometimes it is as small as better coffee, a more thoughtful amenity or an evening ritual that makes returning to the room feel different.
The philosophy is not to add for the sake of adding. It is to find the touchpoints that can change how a stay feels.
Sleep entered that conversation almost casually.
Over dinner, a Swedish friend spoke about Hästens and the bed he hoped to own one day. The name stayed in mind. Curiosity became research. Riva One began looking at how Hästens appeared within hospitality, how its beds were made and, importantly, whether there was an opportunity to experience that level of sleep in Cape Town.
The question quickly became compelling. Guests can spend close to a third of a stay in bed. A property can perfect its view, its minibar, its entertainment, its coffee and its service, but if the hours between turning out the light and waking the following morning are merely adequate, one of the most consequential parts of the experience has been left relatively untouched.
For a property built around continual improvement, that was difficult to ignore.
The search was not simply for a more expensive mattress. It was for a partner whose product and philosophy could justify becoming part of Riva One’s evolving story.
Hästens was founded in Sweden in 1852 and has spent generations refining the craft of sleep. Its approach is unusually material-led: horsehair, wool, cotton and flax are layered and worked by hand to create beds designed around airflow, responsiveness and long-term comfort.
For Riva One, that mattered because the collaboration needed to make sense beyond the name.
The property has increasingly built its guest experience by bringing together internationally recognised specialists and South African makers, producers and artisans. Global excellence does not replace Cape Town’s identity; it sits alongside it. A Swedish bed can coexist with locally roasted coffee, South African wine, local design and craft because each contributes a different layer to the same experience.
There was also an alignment in attitude. Hästens is a heritage company; Riva One is a young hospitality brand. Their histories could hardly be more different. Yet both place unusual emphasis on materials, detail and the idea that something already very good can still be improved.
The fact that Hästens was willing to engage with a young, independent property mattered to Riva One. The partnership became less about borrowing the stature of an established luxury name and more about what could happen when an established specialist and an emerging hospitality concept took one another seriously.
Once the conversation became real, the decision moved from brand to experience.
Riva One did not automatically select the most expensive bed in the Hästens collection. Different models were experienced in person, back to back, with a practical hospitality question in mind: which configuration could feel unmistakably special while welcoming the widest possible range of guests?
The answer was the Hästens Maranga.
The attraction was immediate but difficult to reduce to a conventional specification. There was a sense of buoyancy, almost of floating, combined with support that did not announce itself. Returning to an ordinary bed afterwards made the difference easier to understand than any catalogue description could.
For hospitality, that balance mattered. A private owner can select firmness around one person’s body and preference. A guest room cannot. It may welcome a light sleeper from Singapore one week, a tall traveller from Germany the next, a couple from New York after an overnight flight, or someone arriving from Johannesburg for a short weekend.
Riva One therefore chose the Hästens Maranga after experiencing several models in person. The team kept returning to its distinctive balance of buoyancy, responsiveness and support, making the model itself the defining choice for the guest experience.
The California King proportions follow the same logic. Holiday should feel generous. The additional length provides greater comfort for taller guests, while the scale of the bed creates a sense of space that feels appropriate to a stay where everyday compromises are meant to recede.
There is also deliberate restraint in choosing the Maranga rather than treating the top of the price list as the definition of luxury. The objective was not to install the most expensive bed Hästens makes. It was to select the bed that made the most sense for Riva One’s guests now, while preserving a philosophy that allows the experience to continue evolving in years to come.
“Chosen for what happens when the day ends.”
Riva One
Hästens’ checked fabric is instantly recognisable, but the more consequential story is underneath it.
Horsehair is used not as an exotic flourish but because of what it does. Its structure allows air to move through the bed and helps moisture dissipate rather than remain trapped around the sleeper. Cotton and wool contribute to natural temperature regulation and breathability. Flax provides structure and durability. Springs and natural filling work together to respond to movement rather than forcing the body into a fixed position.
For a coastal city such as Cape Town, where warm summer days can give way to cooler Atlantic evenings, that ability to breathe is particularly relevant.
The technical construction, however, is not intended to become homework for the guest. Riva One does not expect someone arriving after a long flight to study layers of horsehair before going to bed.
The value of the craft should be felt before it needs to be explained.
That is an important distinction in the partnership. Hästens provides a remarkable amount of technical and material depth for those who want to discover it, but the first measure of success is simpler: does the guest lie down and immediately sense that this is different? Do they wake the next morning feeling restored without having had to think about why?
The story can come afterwards.
None of this means the bed suddenly becomes the loudest object at Riva One.
Walk into a suite and Cape Town still arrives first.
The eye moves naturally toward the Atlantic, the horizon and the changing light. The landscape is too powerful, and too fundamental to the property, to compete with. Riva One has never wanted its interiors to overpower that setting.
The Hästens beds are intended to work in the same way.
Their colour, natural materials and distinctive check add another layer to the rooms. They are noticeable, but gradually. The detail reveals itself after the view. What begins as a visual element becomes tactile when a guest sits down, and experiential when they finally sleep.
In that sense, the bed becomes a subtle anchor rather than a centrepiece.
It is where the day ends after dinner, a museum visit, a drive through the Winelands, a swim or a hike. It is where the guest retreats from the stimulation of Cape Town. And it is where the following day begins.
The architecture was not designed around Hästens, and Riva One has no interest in rewriting its own history to suggest otherwise. The more interesting story is that an existing space can continue to improve. Hästens enters an established architectural language and adds depth to it without asking the room to become something else.
The view remains the first impression. The details are what reveal themselves over time.
The collaboration is also prompting Riva One to look beyond the bed itself.
If the property is going to invest this deeply in the quality of sleep, what should happen in the hour before it? And what should the first hour of the morning feel like?
Those questions are informing the next evolution of Riva One’s evening and morning rituals.
The intention is not to turn sleep into a programme guests have to follow. There will be no prescribed wellness schedule or complicated bedtime choreography. The objective is the opposite: remove friction and create the conditions in which slowing down feels natural.
That can mean the room being reset for the evening, the right lighting, water within reach, thoughtful bedside charging, a pillow preference already understood, scent used with restraint, something warm to drink, or a small edible detail that marks the transition from day to night.
It can also mean what is absent: unnecessary light, clutter, noise and the feeling that the guest still has decisions to make.
Morning is part of the same arc. Riva One is developing the experience around how guests wake, from natural light and the first view of the Atlantic to coffee and tea. Its collaboration with Rosetta Roastery, for example, gives something as everyday as the first coffee of the morning a distinctly Cape Town identity.
Hästens is therefore not the final piece of a completed sleep ritual. It is the catalyst for going deeper. The arrival of the beds raises the standard of the central experience, which in turn asks everything around it to rise as well.
There is a temptation in contemporary luxury hospitality to equate personalisation with data: preferred room temperature, favourite wine, pillow type, dietary requirements.
Those things matter. But Riva One is interested in what all that information is meant to produce emotionally.
The answer is the feeling of being taken care of.
Not managed. Not impressed at every turn. Not reminded constantly of how much something costs.
Taken care of.
For someone arriving in Cape Town after a long journey from New York, São Paulo, Hong Kong or Dubai, the ambition is that the first night becomes a reset. They may not be able to identify precisely why they wake feeling different. The bed, temperature, silence, lighting and small evening details should work together quietly enough that the outcome feels effortless.
For guests already close to Cape Town, the objective is similar. Restoration does not require jet lag. Riva One wants the house to become a place people associate with feeling safe, relaxed and welcome: a private base that gives them the confidence to go out and experience the city because they know where they are returning to.
That emotional idea also explains why a significant investment in beds makes sense to a small property. A spectacular object can be photographed. A restorative night becomes personal.
The latter is harder to market, but potentially much harder to forget.
The Hästens beds arrived in October 2026. It will be tempting to call that the completion of the project.
Riva One sees it differently.
The beds represent a new beginning in the property’s approach to the hours between evening and morning. Guest feedback will shape what happens next. Rituals will evolve. Details will be tested. Some will remain; others will change.
That willingness to adapt is part of the property’s origin story.
Riva One itself was not the result of a perfectly linear plan. A family became unexpectedly rooted in South Africa. A home became a place shared with guests. The guests changed the ambition. The ambition became a business. And the business continues to evolve through the people who stay there and the partners who become part of it.
In that sense, every guest contributes something to the history of the house.
The aim is for people to leave feeling that their stay was not generic or interchangeable, but considered for them: that they were welcomed into something still alive and developing, rather than processed through a finished formula.
Hästens now becomes part of that story.
Not because Riva One needed another luxury logo, but because a conversation over dinner prompted a question, the question led to research, and the research revealed an opportunity to meaningfully improve something fundamental.
You rarely get what you do not ask for.
Riva One asked.
Hästens was willing to answer.
Cape Town will always do much of the work.
The Atlantic will still stop guests when they enter the room. Lion’s Head will still change colour as the light moves. The city’s restaurants, galleries, beaches, vineyards and people will still provide the experiences that fill the days.
Riva One’s role is not to compete with any of that.
It is to give those experiences a place to land.
A place where a guest can close the door, exhale and feel looked after. Where international craftsmanship and Cape Town character coexist without one overwhelming the other. Where the details reveal themselves gradually. Where sleep is given the attention it deserves precisely because so much of it happens when nobody is watching.
The partnership with Hästens is an unusually tangible expression of that philosophy.
A bed cannot define a hospitality brand. But the decision to care this much about how someone sleeps can say a great deal about one.
Riva One began as a family’s way of holding onto a place they had fallen in love with. Its next chapter is about helping other people form their own relationship with it: through what they see, taste, hear and experience, but also through something far quieter.
The feeling of waking beside the Atlantic genuinely restored.
And, perhaps, taking a little of that feeling home.
Stays in Sole, Luna and Mare now include sleeping on a Hästens bed. Stays can be booked at riva-one.com or through the Riva One concierge.
Read the Hästens story Visit hastens.com ↗Riva One is a privately owned residence in Camps Bay, Cape Town, run personally rather than as a conventional hotel.
Hästens is a family-owned Swedish bed maker, founded in 1852 in Köping, Sweden. Its beds are handmade in Sweden from natural materials including horsehair, wool, cotton and flax. hastens.com