A 1930s timber mill and power station that once supplied electricity to the South African towns of Knysna and Plettenberg Bay now operates as a 5-star boutique hotel on the Garden Route. Co-owners Geoff Engel and Dandre Lerm opened the Turbine Boutique Hotel and Spa on Thesen Islands on 12 August 2010, after almost three years of rezoning, approvals, and construction work.
The site was originally known as Paarden Island until Norwegian émigré Charles William Thesen bought the land in 1904 and established timber processing there in 1922, giving the archipelago its current name. Thesen’s family had emigrated from Norway to Knysna in 1870 and built a sprawling network of enterprises across the town in the decades that followed.
Wood waste from the mill fuelled a purpose-built power station whose turbines carried electricity to Knysna and Plettenberg Bay for nearly four decades. The current structure, which today houses the hotel and the adjoining Island Café, was built around 1939 before being connected to the Eskom grid.
Industrial conglomerate Barlows acquired the logging operations in 1974 and decommissioned them in early 1980 due to environmental concerns, eventually selling the site to developer CMAI. That sale turned the precinct into an internationally recognised marina, today home to Thesen Harbour Town, 596 residential dwellings, 19 interlinked islands, and a network of canals.
The power station ran its final shift on 26 June 2001, with a proposed museum concept failing to materialise in the years that followed. Engel and Lerm bought the derelict site in September 2007, inheriting the original wood boiler, four electricity generators, and a mass of industrial equipment that had powered the region for a generation.
Rather than stripping the plant for a conventional hotel fit-out, the pair restored the machinery in place and built guest rooms around it. Accommodation runs to 17 standard rooms, 6 luxury rooms, a honeymoon suite, and 2 self-contained suites adjacent to the main hotel, each fitted with a flat-screen TV, WiFi, a fully stocked minibar, and a tea and coffee station.
The Turbine Spa, regarded as one of the finest on the Garden Route, rounds out the guest offering alongside the 90-seater Island Café, a gastro pub, conference facilities, and a pool deck. The restored boiler and four generators now stand as centrepieces of the interior, ringed by bare brickwork, whitewashed walls, and pipework painted in vivid red, blue, green, and orange above brightly coloured dining chairs.
The Turbine Boutique Hotel and Spa describes itself as “a living testimony to the past of this unique operation and site,” according to the property’s official history.
Motorised pontoon cruises depart from a private jetty, carrying guests onto the Knysna lagoon around the islands that built the Thesen family fortune. The Turbine now trades as a 26-room heritage property anchored by a restored boiler, four generators, and almost a century of Knysna timber-industry history — a rare South African hotel built inside a preserved 20th-century industrial landmark.
