Imba Matombo. House of stones.
A Zimbabwean family-run lodge in the northern suburbs of Harare, set across twelve acres of gardens, woodland and views — a warm, traditional home where everybody is welcome.
Imba Matombo opened in the 1980s and was, for two decades, recognised as Harare's premier lodge — a quiet, gracious base for international broadcasters, entrepreneurs and public figures travelling through Zimbabwe.
Under new family stewardship, the lodge is being brought back to the standard that made its name. The bones of the place are as strong as they were forty years ago. The work is in the details: restored thatch, refreshed rooms, a renewed kitchen, a proper bar programme, a spa partnership, and gardens tended the way they always should have been.
Harare has no shortage of hotels. What it has very few of is thirteen-room family-run lodges, on twelve acres, fifteen minutes from the city and forty from the airport, where the gate is open to everybody — families for breakfast, friends for a braai, neighbours for a sundowner. Imba Matombo is the one that remembers how it used to be done — and is determined to do it that way again.
Glen Lorne is one of Harare's oldest and quietest northern suburbs. The lodge sits on twelve acres at the foot of a hill, four of which are natural msasa woodland left as it's been for generations.
The grounds hold more birdlife than most guests expect: fish eagle from nearby Lewtin Dam, hornbills, go-away birds, turacos, sunbirds. Vervet monkeys are regular, unbothered visitors. The msasa turns from deep red to green each October and holds the hillside through the dry months.
The view runs north across the valley to Domboshawa — the granite dome that gives this part of Zimbabwe its character — and the teak deck and pool terrace catch the sunset year-round. It is, by accident of geography and by choice of site, one of the best sundowner positions in Harare.
Fifteen minutes to the city centre. Forty to Robert Mugabe International Airport. Close enough for business, far enough to feel away from it.
Independent. Zimbabwean-owned. Run by a family, not a group — and open to everybody, not only the people staying the night.
Thirteen rooms — small enough that the team knows who's staying and why. Twelve acres — large enough to host a wedding, a conference and a quiet weekend without any of them knowing the others are there. A restaurant, a bar, a spa, four conference packages, wedding and private event spaces — all on one property, managed by one team.
Most small lodges are specialised. Most full-service hotels are large and impersonal. Imba Matombo is the one with the scale of the second and the character of the first.
The day-to-day of Imba Matombo is run by a long-standing staff, some of whom have been on the property for more than a decade — gardeners, chefs, housekeepers, reception, and security who know the rhythms of the place better than anyone.
The family's hospitality background runs deep: honours-degree-level training in event management, senior experience in Michelin-starred restaurants in Mayfair and private members' clubs in London including the RAC, and international awards in mixology, wine and spirits. That background shapes how the lodge is run — without being what the lodge is about.
We partner with several Zimbabwean universities and hospitality schools to host interns each year. Most of them leave with skills that take them into careers in hospitality across the region. Some come back to work with us.
The spa on the property — The Hidden Jewel Spa Sanctuary — is operated as an independent partner business. Two treatment rooms, garden wellness space, and a full menu of treatments using Aloe Ferox Zimbabwe botanicals. Guests of the lodge, wedding parties, and conference delegates all have full access.
Visit The Hidden Jewel →
Harare deserves a family-run lodge that remembers how hospitality used to work — guests recognised, staff respected, food made from scratch, bar programmes taken seriously, gardens tended year-round, and the kind of quiet that lets people actually rest, whether they stay the night or just come for the day.
That's what Imba Matombo is being rebuilt to be. Not a reinvention. A return.
3 Albert Close, Glen Lorne
Harare, Zimbabwe