Take a rundown neglected old hotel in an underexposed seaside resort, inject a soupçon of good design and watch it flower again. The Liz McGrath collection is achieving fabled status in South Africa by using good design to raise hotels into the first rank of global competition. Their Cellars Hohenort in Constantia Cape Town has been one of the city's leading hotels for many years, and I kept hearing from South African friends that the Marine was special, both in its location and in the quality of the interiors. So, climbing into a borrowed truck, I set out to see if it Liz McGrath's design group could have done it again

Hermanus is a small seaside resort on Walker Bay, off the famous garden route that runs from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth. One pleasant surprise from the start was an almost total absence of the electrified barbed wire which usually guarded gated estates. Neat housing developments have almost removed the 'camps' that so characterise areas like Hout Bay in Cape Town. Indeed driving into the town was a little like driving into some English seaside towns - a long road lined with housing, garages,churches, supermarkets and schools turning into narrow streets lined with fishmongers, restaurants, and all the typical small souvenir shops that characterise seaside resorts the world over.

The hotel sits in a prime location on the cliff top overlooking the bay where it was built in the 1920s. It looked very cool, its white exterior reflecting sunlight set against the greyblue stormy sky on the rainy winter day I arrived. The hotel gardens are actually a public space through which meanders the cliff walk, where people strolled with their binoculars, whale spotting and taking the air. An odd note was struck by the sight of a brown mongoose running along the path and the bay was flecked with whitecaps and sprays of flume as whales vented.

Entrance to the hotel was through a classical portico immediately inside which was the popular fish restaurant, the speciality restaurant of the hotel. To the right was the bar and lounge with whale bones on the wall as a reminder that Hermanus and this area have a long history supporting the fishing and whaling fleets going back into the 19th century. Huge windows overlooked the sea, and the building has had some major remodelling to open up the internal ground floor area to the narrow terrace and the views of the bay beyond the gardens.

The protea is the national flower of South Africa and was abundantly present in the public areas, providing a dramatic display at the end of the reception corridor as a visual 'stop'.