Simon Wood built the first private villa on the Jambiani shoreline in 2003. It was a riad around a central pool, under a palm-leaf makuti roof. He and his wife, Francesca Scalfari, later enlarged it into Sharazad Boutique Hotel, using local materials and local labour. The family still owns it, and Scalfari has long supported the island’s women’s groups.
Beyond them, the Indian Ocean fills the silence.
The hotel opens onto the beach beside Jambiani village, on Zanzibar’s southeast coast, about an hour by road from the airport. Most rooms do without television or air conditioning, keeping ceiling fans overhead and large windows open to the breeze. Beyond them, the Indian Ocean fills the silence. Between the rooms, tropical garden runs down to the sand.
Francesca Scalfari, an Italian who came to the island through tourism, runs the hotel with Simon Wood. The rooms are pared back and well spaced, with little in them that is not needed. Zanzibari building habits set the frame, makuti palm thatch included, and Italian restraint edits everything inside it. The original riad survives, its central pool still at the heart of the family house where it began.
On one of the island’s quieter lagoons, kites lift off the water.
The pools face the Indian Ocean, and the days drift between them and the sand. The View, the restaurant and pool bar, is on the beach, its kitchen turning out crab pasta and grilled seafood. On one of the island’s quieter lagoons, kites lift off the water. In the garden, a spa and a yoga shala share the shade.
Days out reach all over the island, but the first of them begins on foot. A guided walk leads out through Jambiani village and on to neighbouring Paje, finishing at the Seaweed Centre. It is the easiest way to see the village the hotel shares its beach with. Then the sea takes over. A traditional wooden dhow sails the reef at sunrise, or at sunset as the light turns gold. Chumbe Island, meanwhile, is a strictly protected marine sanctuary. It admits only a limited number of visitors, and that limit is what keeps the pressure off its reefs and the coconut crabs that live there.
Divers head north to Mnemba Atoll for PADI diving, while boats go out off Kizimkazi looking for dolphins. Inland, the sea gives way to the shade of Jozani Forest, where guides track Kirk’s red colobus monkeys through the canopy. On Changuu Island, giant tortoises live out their days at their own unhurried pace, a slower kind of encounter after the dolphins and the dive boats. Stone Town rounds off the circuit. A day among the old town’s alleys ends in Forodhani Gardens, which fill with street food stalls as evening comes on.
A traditional wooden dhow sails the reef at sunrise, or at sunset as the light turns gold.
Simon Wood and Francesca Scalfari still live on Zanzibar with their son, Luca, and the hotel runs like a house with its owners close by. The staff bring warmth without fuss. The family also runs Sharazad Wonders in Stone Town, so a few nights in the old town pair naturally with days on the beach at Jambiani. Honeymoons and wellness retreats are arranged as packages, built around the spa in the garden and the yoga shala.
Mornings here begin with a swim in one of the pools, or with a yoga class in the shala. By afternoon the choice lies between the shade of the spa and the wind out on the kite lagoon, and neither is the wrong one. Sunset belongs to a dhow on the reef, or to the pool bar as the light fades. Dinner comes last, served out on the sand at The View. After that there is only the sound of the Indian Ocean in the dark beyond the open windows, and a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.
accommodation
Just over twenty villa rooms and bungalows are set well apart from each other in a pared-back coastal style. In most, the air conditioning and television are simply absent. Large windows stay open to the sea breeze and ceiling fans turn overhead, which suits the unplugged character of the whole hotel.
activities
The pools face the Indian Ocean, with a spa in the garden and a yoga shala. Further afield, days out take in dhow sailing on the reef, Kirk's red colobus in Jozani Forest, dolphin trips off Kizimkazi and Changuu's giant tortoises. There are walks through Jambiani and Paje to the Seaweed Centre, evenings in Stone Town at the Forodhani night market, visits to Chumbe Island and PADI diving at Mnemba Atoll.
dining
The View stands on the beach shore below the garden, its à la carte menu Italian, Asian and Zanzibari at once: crab linguine with chilli, garlic and white wine, a grilled seafood platter, the catch of the day from local fishermen, kalimati dumplings in syrup. Dinner can be taken barefoot by candlelight on the sand. Stays run bed and breakfast, half board or full board, and one of the hotel's own packages adds a Swahili cooking class.
Get in touch and let’s start the conversation. An initial consultation helps us understand what you’re looking for, whether that’s specific experiences, luxury touches, or marking a special occasion, and from there we’ll guide you through what’s possible so you can decide if we’re the right fit.
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Fly into Zanzibar's Abeid Amani Karume International Airport, then drive south east across the island to Jambiani, about an hour on made roads. Jambiani has no airstrip of its own, so that last leg is by road however you arrive, and we build the transfer into the booking. From Dar es Salaam the flight over is a twenty minute hop across the channel.
Off a northern Tanzania safari, Auric Air flies direct to Zanzibar from Seronera and Kogatende in the Serengeti, an hour and three quarters in the air, and several times a day from Arusha in about an hour and a quarter. Where a schedule would cut a last morning short, we can put in a private charter, a Cessna Caravan or a Pilatus PC-12, into the same airport.
Yes. TravelHealthPro, the UK's official travel health service, rates malaria risk as high in every part of Tanzania below 1,800 metres and names Zanzibar inside that line, with antimalarial tablets among the measures it recommends there. The CDC draws the same boundary for Tanzania and recommends prescription medicine to prevent malaria. Jambiani is at sea level, well within the advice.
We are travel planners, not medical people, and we do not make medical recommendations. Which tablets suit you, how they sit with anything else you take and what is right for a child are questions for your own doctor or a travel clinic, best asked once with the whole itinerary in front of them. Beyond that, cover arms and legs after dark and keep repellent by the bed.
It walks a long way out. Jambiani lies on the south east coast behind a fringing reef, and the lagoon inside that reef is wide and shallow, so at spring low water the sea can withdraw two or three hundred metres and leave sand, seagrass and coral flat where it was. Swimming from the beach is at its best in the hours either side of high water.
This is the rhythm of the whole east coast, and it is the better half of the day to watch. Low water is when the village comes out onto the flats: women working the seaweed plots in their kangas, children on the sand bars, fishing boats sitting on their keels until the water returns. We read the tide tables when we place your dates, so nobody is caught out.
It began in 2003 as a private villa on the Jambiani shore, the first along that shoreline, built as a riad with a veranda round a central pool under a makuti palm thatch roof. Simon Wood and Francesca Scalfari turned the family home into a hotel in the mid 2010s, and it has grown into just over twenty rooms and bungalows. They still run it and live on the island.
How it is run is the other half of the story. Solar panels and LED lighting carry the power, a desalination plant makes the fresh water, waste is sorted for recycling, and the building went up with local labour and local materials. Most rooms have no television and no air conditioning by choice, with ceiling fans and big windows doing the cooling. Guests are twelve and over.
June to October is the pick of it. The kusi wind comes up from the south east, the air dries and cools to the high twenties, and the sea settles, with the clearest water of that run in September and October. February is the month to have in the hot season, the driest and calmest of the kaskazi stretch, when visibility offshore regularly passes thirty metres.
April and May are the long rains and we would steer you elsewhere then: heavy, prolonged downpours, run off that clouds the water and a good many beach places shut for the season. November and December carry the short rains, which fall in bursts between long sunny spells, and they have a real case: glassy seas, warm water, fewer people and far easier availability.
Four or five at the end of a safari, and a week if the beach is the whole point of the trip. The arithmetic is the reason. A Serengeti flight lands around the middle of the day, the drive south east takes the best part of an hour, and departure morning ends at half past ten, so three nights leaves only two whole days on the sand.
The days fill easily. There is a spa in the garden, a yoga shala with daily classes, a gym, pools facing the ocean and a kite and watersports centre on the lagoon. Dhow sailing with snorkelling goes out at sunrise or sunset, Jozani Forest holds the Kirk's red colobus, diving runs out to Mnemba Atoll, and Stone Town is fifty minutes up the road.
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