Best Hotels in Karen, Nairobi

Giraffe Manor is unquestionably one of the world's most extraordinary hotel experiences — a 1930s Kenyan manor house where a resident herd of Rothschild giraffe join guests at the breakfast table and peer through bedroom windows in the early light. The Safari Collection property has only 13 rooms, all individually decorated, and demand consistently outstrips the available nights. Booking many months in advance is an absolute necessity.

• Bucket List
• Wildlife
• Heritage
• Karen

Modelled on the intimate luxury of its sibling property in Watamu, Hemingways Nairobi delivers a 45-suite boutique hotel in the heart of Karen with service that feels closer to a private members' club. The outdoor fireplace lounge, curated library, and garden setting create an atmosphere of quiet gravitas; the rooftop restaurant serves some of the city's most accomplished cuisine.

• Boutique
• Luxury
• Karen
• Pre-Safari Base

A small, exquisitely styled boutique hotel on a lush Karen estate that feels more like an intimate private safari lodge than a city hotel. Eleven suites are decorated with museum-quality African artefacts and artworks; the pool is fringed by jacaranda and flame trees, and the open-air restaurant serves outstanding East African cuisine. An ideal pre- or post-safari retreat.

• Boutique
• Art
• Garden
• Karen

Though technically set in the greater Mara ecosystem, Olare Mara Kempinski is the Nairobi-based traveller's most prestigious fly-in option — a tented camp of 12 luxury suites in a private conservancy bordering the Maasai Mara. For those using Nairobi as a safari base, the short charter flight and the camp's extraordinary game density make this the natural upgrade.

• Safari
• Luxury Tented
• Maasai Mara
• Fly-In