Residence Retreat
March 16th - 22nd, 2026 • Cape Town, South Africa
How can we harvest with our souls? What lies beneath a product’s history? How can we transform traditions into novelties?
Residence is a community-driven retreat rooted in local ingredients and seasonal produce. Guided by farmers and the land itself, you are invited to explore what lies beneath an ingredient’s history, harvesting not only with your hands, but with your soul. You honor tradition while gently pushing it into the unknown, transforming memory into novelty.
Through cooking, study, and holistic experimentation, you immerse yourself in felt experiences and shared discovery. You step into a world that shifts, evolves, and surprises. As an ode to the ingredients and their stories, you will create recipes both collectively and individually, culminating in a book that you will take home with you that captures this journey of exploration, transformation, and unforgettable memory.
In Residence, we share the joint need for felt experiences.
Learning through exploring the unknown, with an infinite amount of inspiration.
Residence almost sounds like resonance , it should feel like your own known world, full of its own memories and traditions, is being pushed in to the unknown.
For the main force behind the spirit of Residence, we aim to be guided by local’s ingredients, cook with them, study their history and experiment with their culinary & holistic possibilities, and ultimately transmute them in to dishes.
As an ode to the ingredients, we will, in group & individually, create recipes that will be collected into a book. This book will encapsulate our joint mission of unforgettable explorative memories.
From making biltong, to harvesting fynbos and making our own essential oils.
From milking cows,
to cheese making, to butter slapping, to intuitive cooking.
Guided by a select team of facilitators, including chefs, botanists, farmers & creative thinkers, your ideas will be pushed in to the collective Fruiting Body and become tools for navigating the complexities of daily living.
Retreat Manifesto
Residence is a community-driven experience focused on local ingredients and seasonal produce. The main thread runs through the most natural part of co-living: food. The land around us - fields, rivers, mountains, ocean - becomes our classroom. We come here to explore, experiment, learn, and share what we discover.
Throughout the week, guests cook both independently and in intuitive small groups, sometimes guided by the chef. We spend time together getting to - the landscape, the products, and the techniques - tasting, testing, and building skills in a hands-on way.
On the final day, everyone cooks for everyone using fresh, locally produced ingredients. We gather for a big Residence dinner at a long community table - each person contributing something to the meal. We photograph, take notes, and capture the recipes, with the intention to publish them as a small book or zine: a record of what the week created.
To shape the six days, we invite a small group of facilitators to share knowledge across food, land-based practices, and wellbeing.
Program
Residence is guided by intuitive cooking: food that’s fresh, seasonal, and shaped by what’s grown, made, and found in the landscape around us. Over the week, chef-curated meals become part of the learning — a way of understanding the land through taste, technique, and shared tables. We invite you to eat from the ecosystem of the land we’ll be living in for six days. Ingredients may be unfamiliar, seasonal, and change depending on what the farm and surrounding area offer.
This retreat is for those who are passionate about food and curious to deepen their relationship with cooking. Under the guidance of professional chef Timur Yilmaz, you’ll be supported with expert knowledge while being given the space to cook intuitively, explore freely, and trust your own instincts.
Throughout the week, each participant will craft a dish or recipe shaped by the landscape, the season, and their own intuition. These creations will be collected into a shared retreat cookbook — a keepsake you’ll bring home with you as a reminder of the experience, the flavors, and the time spent cooking together.
Please share any allergies or dietary requirements in advance so we can plan accordingly.
Food
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Timur Yilmaz has built a career shaped by both international excellence and deep personal heritage. Trained in some of the world’s most acclaimed kitchens — including Pujol in Mexico City, Frantzén in Stockholm, and CODA in Berlin — Yilmaz became known for a cuisine rooted in precision, restraint, and introspection.
Food has always played a central role in his life. His German grandfather, a passionate home baker, filled family gatherings with pastries and cakes, leaving a lasting impression. Surrounded from an early age by layered aromas and contrasting flavours, Yilmaz began cooking for his family as a teenager while his parents were working, experimenting freely and developing an instinctive understanding of taste.
After completing his work at a Japanese- and Buddhist-inspired restaurant — where he refined a distinctive vegan culinary language — Yilmaz is now entering a new chapter. He is relocating to Italy to begin a long-term project that reaches beyond the kitchen. The move marks a shift from interpretation to origin; from philosophical cooking to a direct relationship with the land itself.
In Italy, Yilmaz aims to build a practice where agriculture and cuisine are inseparable, grounding his work in seasonality, self-sufficiency, and place.
What your days will look like
Meet the facilitators
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Lars is an intuitive artist whose creative work naturally brings people together. Inspired by travel, local traditions, community, and food, each journey has shaped his understanding of collective meaning and belonging.
His interests span colour, travel, local traditions, community, and cooking, with each journey deepening his understanding of how people gather, share, and create meaning together.
After a world trip last year, Lars felt a strong desire to distill everything he had learned about communal living and collective experience. This vision deepened at Japan's Ishinoko Festival, where he was moved by the intentional unification of people who began as strangers.
This love for bringing unfamiliar people together gave birth to Residence. The facilitators he chose were initially strangers themselves, who through the process became close friends and are now like family.
With a background in event hosting and creative production, his new project Residence became a natural culmination: an invitation into a shared space of curiosity, openness, and playfulness.
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Camilla’s Cape Fynbos Oils have been part of our world since 2017, recognised for their powerful, almost spiritual presence. Snowbush — a locally endemic wild rosemary — remains a firm favourite, loved for its distinctive character and sense of place. Camilla is a fynbos botanist and one of South Africa’s most respected practitioners, celebrated for the depth of knowledge and care she brings to her craft.
Fynbos
A distinctive type of vegetation found only on the southern tip of Africa. It includes an extraordinary range of plant species, particularly small heather-like trees and shrubs.
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Maria van Zyl is the owner of Vergesig Farm, a family-run farm set high in the Piket-Bo-Berg Mountains, bordering a beautiful nature reserve rich with indigenous flora and wildlife. The farm is organic and operates with biodynamic farming systems, taking a holistic approach that supports soil health, biodiversity, and animal wellbeing as one connected ecosystem.
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Adriaan van Zyl is an independent winemaker with roots in the Swartland, guided by a quiet devotion to the vineyard and the slow magic of the cellar. When he’s not shaping wines of his own, he’s at Vergesig Farm — living the seasons, working the land, and letting nature set the pace.
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Jude is a long-time friend and an inspirational connector in his community in Cape Town. His generational knowledge of Cape Town’s land, water, and culture helps us connect more deeply to the meaning behind “local”. Jude will “wys” us the good stuff.
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David Plenderleith is an artist, Reiki practitioner and sanctioned Medicine Guide. His professional training took place at the KaosPilots school in Switzerland where he studied an Earth Wisdom tradition called the Council Guide Training.
“Both profound and highly practical, these teachings are from an oral tradition of indigenous peoples of the Americas, who understood what was needed for humans to live together in harmony while at the same time honoring individual freedom and self authority. In this understanding, we are all sacred beings - along with 'all our relations', meaning all other life forms in our universe.”
Through the study of different medicine wheels, David travels with a bundle of wisdom which is offered as maps of consciousness in ceremonial settings. David is passionate about group facilitation and helping individuals and organisations realise their fullest potential.
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Sennia conducts group sauna ceremonies blending traditional slavic techniques with a contemporary, sensory approach.
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Henry is a sailor, alpinist, and adventurer who runs a summer sailing program in Cape Town. His trips are about the real feeling of being under sail on open water — wind, speed, and the silence between waves. This is a true sailing experience, guided by a professional crew, with space to learn by doing: how to helm, trim sails, and navigate.
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Olive Brown is a Los Angeles-based chef and designer. Born and raised in LA and educated in New York and London, she moved to Berlin as a fashion designer before shifting her focus to food.
Living in different cities and experiencing an array of cultures and cuisines, Olive recognized both the importance and beauty of bringing people together through the sharing of food. She began hosting dinner parties at her studio in Berlin and brought that with her when she moved to Mexico City. Over time, her ethos grew and developed - not only can a meal encourage the exchange of ideas, but it has the power to build community, to teach, to inspire and to heal.
A culinary opportunity brought Olive back to LA, where she started a catering company that produced food for film and tv productions, as well as private and commercial clients. Currently, Olive works internationally cooking for events, retreats and pop-ups, creating food installations and tablescapes, and continues to host dinners for family and friends.
Workshops
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Intuitive cooking
On the day of arrival, Timur will host the first Residence dinner, highlighting his research into local ingredients and uncovering their histories — as well as reviving forgotten dishes and recipes.
With his experience in Michelin-starred kitchens, he will offer technical guidance to elevate your cooking skills. He will also bring specialised tools for techniques such as extraction, emulsification, and sous-vide.
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Cheese and butter making
Farm-based workshop: start early and join the milking team in the parlour to learn how to milk a cow. After milking, we’ll walk the cows out to pasture and enjoy a coffee in the field with fresh warm milk.
Using the morning’s milk, you’ll then learn the basics of natural cheese and cultured butter making. You’ll make your own cheese and butter during the workshop and take both home with you.
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Fynbos harvesting
Early morning mountain walk to harvest fynbos - the Western Cape’s unique floral kingdom. We’ll explore the land together, learn how to harvest with care, and gather plants for distillation.
Then we go straight into the making: creating essential oils while everything is still fresh. You’ll see every step and learn the full process - from landscape to plant, from plant to oil.
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Wine tasting & vermouth making
At Residence, Adriaan will facilitate a tasting of his latest wines — and host a hands-on blending moment.
Guests will fill their own bottles with a base wine infused with herbs and spices, making their own vermouth to take home.
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Sauna journey
Sennia will lead a guided sauna ritual using herbal steam made from herbs collected near the farm, followed by an oak whisk massage.
It’s a sensory journey designed for deep relaxation, renewal, and connection - with the land carried into the heat through scent, steam, and touch.
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Scent & sound journey
Creating space for the mind and body to settle into ease, the worlds of the senses entwine seamlessly in this multisensory experience. You are invited to move through layers of scent, sound and meditation - discovering the receptive depth that stretches across a tapestry of feeling. A journey of awareness, these modalities bridge consciousness between physical and non-physical realities, those of the present and those of the mind, allowing brain waves to shift into a dreamlike state.
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Biltong curing
Biltong is a form of air-dried, cured meat which originated in Southern Africa. Various types of meat are used to produce it, ranging from beef to game meats.
In this workshop you will learn how to cure, and make your own spice blend to rub.
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Sailing trip
A four-hour sailing trip off the coast of Cape Town offers a calm closing moment with the city in view from the ocean. Fresh Catch of the day Sashimi meal included.
Retreat location
Kleinkloof Farm • Piketberg, Cape Town, 7550, South Africa
Residence found a place that can hold a whole week - not as an escape, but as an immersion. Kleinkloof Farm is integrated into the landscape of a fertile, working area, where olives grow and the rhythm of the land is real. It sits against the Piketberg Mountain range, with wide, breathtaking views across the Rooi Karoo towards the Winterhoek mountains.
It’s also the kind of place that naturally becomes a small community. Close enough to gather, cook, and share long tables - and spacious enough to retreat, rest, and let new thoughts settle. This is where we live together for a while: exchanging knowledge, learning something new each day, and building the experience as a group, step by step.
A small cluster of former labourers’ cottages has been thoughtfully transformed into separate self-catering houses, each decorated in a luxurious yet understated way that lets the landscape take the lead. Every cottage has its own garden and pool, offering space for slow mornings, long warm afternoons, and unhurried summer days spent resting under the sun.
Accommodation
The property includes five cottages, each with a different room setup (double beds and single beds), with a maximum capacity of 16 guests.
Every cottage has its own equipped kitchen - a small sanctuary where Residence continues between the main group sessions: self-made breakfasts, shared prep, small food experiments, late-night conversations.
Each cottage also has a private terrace with an intimate, tucked-away feel; some include splash pools or hot tubs, and a few offer dedicated outdoor areas for braai evenings and gathering under the open sky.
The main kitchen is at the Farm House, where the chef-curated food experiences take place - our shared centre, where ingredients become dishes, and dishes become memory.
Cottage 1
This cottage features one double bed (which can be split into two single beds upon request), perfect for a couple or friends to share, and has a cosy private terrace and a splash pool — a quiet corner for slow mornings, warm afternoons, and time to reset between activities.
Cottage 2
This cottage features one double bed (which can be split into two single beds upon request), perfect for a couple or friends to share, and has a cosy private terrace and a splash pool — a quiet corner for slow mornings, warm afternoons, and time to reset between activities.
Cottage 3
This cottage is perfect for a couple or friends who are willing to share a bed. In the main bedroom upstairs, where there is a queen bed and the bathroom has a bathtub with a view. There is also a private terrace and a splash pool — a quiet place to reset between sessions.
Cottage 4
This cottage features 2 separate bedrooms, with each room offering the option of 1 double bed, or 2 single beds, perfect for both couples or individuals who are open to sharing a room. It exudes charm with both bedrooms opening up onto the beautiful stone paved outside and a splash pool.
Cottage 5
This spacious 120sqm modern cottage comfortably sleeps six. It opens onto a large outdoor braai terrace, with a round splash pool overlooking the valley — made for long afternoons outside and shared evenings around the fire. There are three separate bedrooms:
Bedroom 1: 1x double bed or 2 × single beds
Bedroom 2: 1 × king-size bed
Bedroom 3: 1 × king-size bed
Pricing
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(2 × single beds / 1 × double bed)
- sold out2,000€ p.p
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1 bedroom (2 × single beds / 1 × double bed)
2,000€ p.p
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1 bedroom (1 king size bed)
€4,800 for two people
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2 bedrooms (each room has either 2 × single beds / 1 × double bed)
- only one room left2,000€ p.p
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Bedroom 1 (2 × single beds or 1 double bed):
2,000€ p.p
Bedroom 2: (1 × king-size bed):
4,400€ for two people
Bedroom 3: 1 × king-size bed
4,400€ for two people
* Early bird pricing until February 16th, 2026
Discounted rates are available for South African residents, and flexible payment plans are also possible. Please contact us for more information.
What’s included
Accommodation for 6 nights at Kleinkloof Farm
Full program and 3x meals per day
4 course dinner in co-creation with Chef Timur Yilmaz
5 expert-led workshops (cheese making, butter making, biltong, vermouth, fynbos harvesting)
Essential oil + custom scent creation with Tres Nagual
1x sound journey
1x sauna ritual
1x guided hike of 22 Waterfalls
4 hour sailing trip
Residence retreat cookbook
What’s not included
Travel to/from the venue
Insurance
Personal expenses,
Arrival & Departure
Arrival — Please arrive by 15:00 on Monday, March 16th.
Departure + closing arc
On the last day after breakfast there will be a small Residence market with the facilitators, so you can take a piece of the week home with you.
Check-out is around 12:00 on Sunday, March 22nd.
In the afternoon, the group will travel back to Cape Town for the final accord: a four-hour sailing experience to see the city from the ocean (departure at 16:00) — a quiet closing moment to let the week settle.
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A 500 euro non-refundable deposit is required to secure your booking.
The remaining balance is due within 72 hours of booking confirmation.
If the balance is not received within 72 hours, we reserve the right to release your spot and apply the cancellation terms below.
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All cancellations must be submitted in writing to info@soulcollective.eu and are effective on the date received.
Refunds (based on retreat start date: 16 March 2026)
On or before 14 February 2026(more than 30 days before start):
Refund of all payments minus the 500 euro deposit.From 15 February 2026 onwards(30 days or less before start):
No refunds (100% of the total retreat price is forfeited).
No-shows / early departures
No refunds will be issued for no-shows, late arrivals, or early departures.
Transfers
You may transfer your booking to another person up to 2 March 2026(14 days prior), provided that:
You notify us in writing at info@soulcollective.eu
The replacement guest completes all required forms/waivers
Any price difference is paid (if applicable)
If We Cancel or Reschedule
If the retreat is cancelled by us, you will receive a full refund of all payments received, or you may choose to transfer to a rescheduled date or future retreat.
We are not responsible for costs you may incur for flights, travel, visas, insurance, or other expenses—please ensure you have travel insurance.
Travel Insurance
We strongly recommend purchasing comprehensive travel insurance that covers trip cancellation, medical emergencies, travel disruption, and unforeseen circumstances.
