Some places get under your skin and stay there. For the Low family, that place has always been Tiwi.
t was 1944 when Walter Low - known to his grandchildren simply as Gaggar - first acquired this property on Kenya's south coast. An Archdeacon by calling, he would retire a few years later to Loldia, the family farm at Naivasha, bringing with him a deep love of the natural world and an instinct for beauty.What he found at Tiwi - the salt-thick air, the wide Indian Ocean horizon, the hoopoe birds moving through the coastal scrub - stayed with him for the rest of his life.
For the generations that followed, Tiwi became the rhythm of the year. Post-Christmas drives down from the farm, arriving mid-afternoon to the smell of the sea and a welcoming breeze. Mornings that began, by Gaggar's insistence, with a dive into the ocean before breakfast. Long evenings on the beach, Grandpa joking that one leg was growing longer than the other as the sand sloped at high tide. Fishermen arriving with fresh catch in their kikapu. Cold coconuts cracked open as a welcome. Monkeys swooping into the banda to steal the cornflakes. The Eerie and Very Eerie pools at low tide, where the brave could dive under a coral bridge and surface in another world entirely. Surging down the Tiwi River as the tide turned. Hurricane lamps casting a warm glow when the electricity cut out.
In a letter written from Switzerland in the summer of 1960, one family member - then nineteen years old - wrote to Gaggar from across the world:
"I remember so well the time we spent at Tiwi... Gaggar specially loved all the music and the guitar and all. Sometimes when I find it hard to wake up in the morning I think of the way he used to make us dive into the sea before breakfast."
Gaggar is gone now. So is the old banda. But the land remains - the same land, the same reef, the same light on the water at dusk.
Today, the Low family has chosen to share it.
Baobahari is not a commercial development in the conventional sense. It is an act of careful stewardship - the family opening a piece of land they have loved for over eighty years to people who will love it in return. Nine generously sized plots of between 0.9 and one acre, designed for homes that sit lightly on the coast, that give back as much as they take.
The family's only condition, if you can call it that, is a shared set of values. A respect for the land. A commitment to sustainability and conservation. A belief in community and the wellbeing of the people and wildlife that make this coastline what it is.
