On 22 August 1785  Dirk Gysbert Van Reenen bought the estate De Papenboom or ‘De Brouwerij’ at Newlands for the large sum of 110 000 guilders, mainly because of the brewery there. For a century owners of this farm had had the monopoly to brew beer and to supply the inns and public-houses at the Cape with it. Van Reenen took over the brewery from his father-in-law, J. W. Hurter, and on this estate the architect, L. M. Thibault, built an elegant residence for Van Reenen. According to Lady Anne Barnard the house was the finest gentleman’s residence in the Cape Colony.

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Another famous Inn was that of “Drie Koppen” where Mowbray is today. In 1723 a burger Johannes Zacharias Beck, lessee of the wine and spirit license at Rondebosch, obtained for the purposes of putting up a tavern, a plot of land.[the] following year, a terrible murder was perpetrated at this tavern when three slaves cruelly did to death at night time two Europeans.

The Court of Justice sentenced them as follows: Their limbs were to be broken without the coup de grace after which they were exposed on the wheel until death ensued, the one with and axe, the other with a knife and the third with a bludgeon above their heads. These were the instruments they had used in their dastardly act. They were then decapitated and the heads placed upon stakes near the spot where the crime had been committed. The in was later named “The Three Cups”

The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley gave a great impetus to the erection of hotels in South Africa, and after 1875 the nature of hotel-ownership began to change: they began to be built by companies with a large capital. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal gave a further stimulus to the erection of hotels, first at Pilgrim’s Rest, Lydenburg, Barberton and thereafter on the Witwatersrand. The economic development which followed stimulated the erection of hotels in the coastal towns as well as in the interior. In the mean time additional hotels were erected in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula.