“Some obsessions start early and never really let go.”

Va Beau was born from a lifetime of beauty, movement, and the deep joy of bringing women together somewhere extraordinary.

I grew up in Johannesburg in the seventies, and we didn’t have television. Not until very late — I remember sitting cross-legged in front of the set for what felt like hours, watching the test pattern, just waiting for something to happen. One channel, eventually. But before that, there were movie theatres. In South Africa in those years, the cinema was everything — the escape, the event, the window into somewhere else entirely. The theatre smelled of hot buttered popcorn and something electric, like the whole audience was collectively holding its breath.

Before the film, there were ads. I will never forget one particular Peter Stuyvesant ad. Tobacco advertising was legal then, and nobody made it look quite like that — women in white bikinis and cocktail dresses on speedboats, cutting through glittering Miami waterways. A nightclub. Bodies moving. That particular kind of laughing that means you are completely, utterly free. It was pastel and heat and danger and I wanted every single second of it. I was a teenager in Johannesburg watching it on a big screen in the dark. I had never seen Miami. I didn’t care. I knew exactly where I needed to go.

“My parents traveled the world and came home with stories, photographs, gifts that smelled like places I couldn’t yet picture. I stayed behind and decided I wouldn’t always.”

My mother was an interior designer with a studio cottage attached to the back of our house, and it was the most exciting room I knew. Bolts of brocade and block-printed cottons stacked against the walls, silks and mohairs draped over every surface, the smell of fabric and possibility permanently in the air. Her staff were theatrical and warm and wonderfully loud, debating colour and drape with the energy of a performance. Clients arrived for presentations and my mother served high tea — finger sandwiches on tiered stands, fine china, the whole theatrical gesture of hospitality as craft. For every family celebration, she had a dress made, usually inspired by a film costume or a designer collection she’d fallen for that year. Six children, all of us her willing canvas. The house itself was always a project: in the eighties, faux paint effects were everything, and we spent entire weekends layering glazes onto walls until they looked like faded Italian plaster, the whole family involved, paintbrushes in hand.

Every summer we drove to Cape Town, where my father ran what I can only describe as a military-grade bagel assembly line before every beach day — cold meats, pickle relish, every possible filling laid out in sequence, enough to feed an army of friends on blankets in the sun. In July we went to Durban, which in South Africa means humid summer heat rather than cold, and those days were all charcoal and boerewors sizzling on the grill, homemade salads passed around, children getting dumped by waves all afternoon, malva pudding and melktart on paper plates as the light turned gold. Community, food, the long unhurried joy of a day that has nowhere to be — this was my entire education.

Before my mother became an interior designer, she and my grandmother ran cooking demonstrations from our home — inviting people in to learn, to taste, to gather around a table. I come from a long line of women who fed people with intention. So when I spent entire afternoons painstakingly recreating the most elaborate recipes from Death by Chocolate — layers of mousse and ganache and brittle, assembled with the focus of someone defusing a bomb — all for the pleasure of watching my mother’s dinner guests take the first bite, I wasn’t just baking. I was continuing something. I didn’t want compliments. I wanted that look — the one where someone closes their eyes for just a second because something is exactly right.
My first trip abroad was with my family — New York, Disney World, then Los Angeles. My father arranged a limousine to collect us at JFK, something none of us had ever seen in South Africa. A tour guide on a bus through the Lower East Side sang New York, New York into a microphone in the most perfectly New York accent I’d ever heard. In Los Angeles, I saw palm trees for the first time. The light was different. The air was different. Everything felt like the movies I had grown up watching through that cinema window — except I was inside it now. When we left to fly back to South Africa, I cried at the airport. I felt like I was leaving home — a home I hadn’t known existed until I arrived.

I became an interior designer, then founded a luxury linen company — custom embroidered, high thread-count Italian linens at a moment when boutique hotels were beginning to replace the staid sameness of chain brands. Travelers were starting to want personality in where they stayed, and these new independent properties wanted every detail to feel intentional — right down to what was on the bed. The Hollywood Roosevelt. Blackberry Farm. We were the edgy alternative to the traditional linen companies, and it felt like exactly the right place to be.
Then came motherhood, the sale of the business, a fashion venture, and a divorce that eventually sent me into the corporate world out of necessity rather than desire. Stability, for a while, had to win. But the dream never went quiet.

I had moved from South Africa to the United States and found myself between worlds, between versions of who I had been. Travel became the thread I kept returning to — not as escape but as orientation. A way back to myself. And I kept asking the same question: where is the one place that holds all of it? The destination and the outfit and the story and the women you’d want beside you. The planning already taken care of, so everyone can simply arrive and be present. The group journey where nobody has to be the caretaker — where you can just, finally, have fun.

“I’ve always been the one planning the trip. Finding the restaurant nobody else knew about. Making sure everyone had the time of their lives. It turns out that’s not just a personality trait. It’s a calling.”

There is something that happens when a group of women are genuinely relaxed together — really laughing, really connecting, no agenda, no one managing anyone else. I’ve felt it enough times to know it’s rare and worth building a whole platform around. Women spend so much of their lives as caretakers and planners, the ones holding everything together for everyone else. Va Beau exists to take all of that off the table. To hand you a journey that’s already been obsessed over, researched, and loved — so you can simply arrive and feel it.

I’d been waiting for someone to build this. Eventually I understood that someone was going to have to be me.