Analjit Singh is best known in South Africa as the billionaire Indian entrepreneur behind Leeu Collection, a luxury hospitality brand that has quietly emerged as one of the biggest property owners at Franschhoek in the Western Cape.
Over the past decade, Singh — known to those close to him as BAS, short for Bhai (brother) Analjit Singh — has assembled four farms, three hotels, six restaurants, two art galleries and a wine label. Behind it is an extraordinary story, as none of it was planned.
He spent three decades building a conglomerate of industrial and telecoms businesses in India, capitalising on the country’s gradual economic opening. Import substitution — producing locally what had previously been imported — was the engine.
By the late 1990s, he had sold his controlling interest in what became Vodafone India and found himself, in his early 50s, unexpectedly at leisure. “I thought I was done,” Singh says from his home on Leeu Estates. “Play golf, live in my homes in England. That’s it.”
The retirement lasted nine months.
Then Singh identified four service sectors built around what he calls “real-time experiences”: insurance, health care, education and hospitality.
The insurance company he was involved with grew into one of India’s top three private life insurers. Max Healthcare became the country’s third-largest hospital group, distinguished by a quality of service he had to fight hard to introduce to Indian medicine. He chaired the Doon School, India’s most storied educational institution, and became a founding partner of the Indian School of Business.
It was a wet winter’s morning in July 2010. Singh had come to South Africa for the football World Cup with his daughter Piya. Their driver on the day suggested a detour into a valley Singh had never heard of. He had no other plans.
They stopped somewhere in Franschhoek. It was raining, the mountains were wrapped in cloud — and something in him stilled. He had never been to Africa before. His inner voice told him he needed to return and he did, several times over the following months.
He suspects the resonance stems from further back in his life. Singh grew up spending school holidays in the high valleys of Kashmir, playing golf on one of India’s highest courses at 2,800m, surrounded by streams and mountain light.
He says Franschhoek, with its encircling peaks, its valley mist and its unpredictable winter days, echoed something deep in his preference system. “Bright conditions are a little provocative for the mind,” he says. “They’re always telling you: do something, do something. It’s my time to sit, to think, to work, to dream.”
In August 2012, having looked at several properties over two years, he saw Klein Dassenberg and liked it immediately. The manor house was a two-bedroom cottage. There was no landscaping and barely a garden. His son pointed out the township visible across the valley. Singh responded: “We can’t be perfectionists about life. If we set ourselves up to control everything, we are setting ourselves up for failure.” At night, he told his son, the lights would look beautiful, like looking up at Mussoorie from the valley below his old school in the Dehradun hills. Embrace it, he said.
Neighbouring farms became available. At the second, he was won over by the wine cellar. His first business, decades earlier in the Netherlands, had involved the fermentation of penicillin, a biomedical process not entirely unlike winemaking, and he recognised a well-made facility when he saw one.
A third farm, owned by advertising man Graham Warsop, took 18 months of negotiations to secure. A fourth followed. In time, Dieu Donné and Von Ortloff became part of Leeu Estates, where Singh has made his home.
The estate now required a winemaker. Word came of English investors who were looking to exit a boutique winery. Singh bought their stake. Mullineux & Leeu Family Wines, producers of the acclaimed Leeu Passant ranges, now operate from the property with a tasting room, The Wine Studio, open to guests.
It wasn’t without its challenges. Because Stellenbosch agricultural zoning prohibits greenfield hospitality development, every structure must be an adaptation of an existing building — a barn, a cottage, a tractor shed. Obtaining the necessary approvals took two years. “A part of me was frustrated,” Singh admits. “But in a higher sense, it’s good. It tells you this is not a free-for-all.”
The space on the Leeu Collection is designed around principles of Vastu Shastra, the ancient Indian architectural science of spatial alignment. The northeast of the property is kept low, open and lit by the rising sun over the Franschhoek Pass. The southwest climbs towards the Dassenberg mountain. Singh says he’s “not as fastidious as I once was”, but on those two cardinal principles he holds firm.
The farm properties run to 23 units, with more cottages under construction that will bring total capacity to about 30 by early next year.
Head down into the village and the Leeu Collection imprint is evident.
Leeu House is a refined 13-suite, adults-only hotel on the main street. Its Cape Dutch gables, mullioned windows, stoep tiles and stable doors have all been meticulously restored.
Then came Le Quartier Français, arguably the valley’s most iconic address, which Singh was approached to acquire and did, after months of deliberation. Fully refurbished, the building now anchors a three-property village portfolio alongside Leeu House and Heritage Square, the old heritage block Singh bought when he realised he needed to control what sat in front of his village properties — a lesson he had learnt the hard way in India.
The acclaimed restaurant La Petite Colombe, meanwhile, had been at Le Quartier Français before moving to Leeu estate in November 2020, after Singh abandoned an ambitious Italian fine-dining concept he’d been developing for years.
His partner Nicolette, a former wine PR consultant in the winelands who is now his life partner, told him plainly one morning during the Covid lockdown that the Italian concept’s price point simply wouldn’t work in South Africa.
He listened, and La Petite Colombe moved in. It holds three Eat Out stars and is full almost every night. The restaurants Epice and Protégé are also partnered with the La Colombe Group, while the restaurant in the manor house on Leeu estate is in-house.
As to whether Leeu Collection is passion or business, Singh quotes a conversation with Joseph Martin, former dean of Harvard Medical School, who told him when he launched Max Healthcare: “If you know a better way to sustain an institution than running it like a business, tell me. The discipline of profit is what you should be thinking of. What you do with your profit is the moral question.”
Singh absorbed the lesson. When the investment at Leeu crossed a threshold where it could no longer be treated as a lifestyle project, he applied the same logic. Efficiency, accountability, return on capital — these, he believes, are not in conflict with soul and affinity.
“It is 100% business, 100% passion, 100% pleasure, 100% affinity, and 100% soul connected,” he says. “And the one thing you have that is depleting every five minutes is your time and your energy. I deploy it here.”
He has no plans to replicate his Indian business interests in South Africa. No health care, no insurance, no industrial venture. For him, South Africa is hospitality and wine, and the lifestyle that wraps around both — though he is interested in pursuing a Cape Town hotel, should the right opportunity arise. Experience has taught him that anything under 40-50 rooms cannot sustain a team at the quality level his model demands.
He is bullish on South Africa. He watched India undergo this trajectory 35 years ago: improving credit ratings, incoming investment, a multiplier effect gathering pace, infrastructure following purchasing power. He sees the same conditions here now, amplified by the quality of Western Cape governance and a measurable rise in international arrivals. His one concern is that the region might grow so fast that it loses what drew people here in the first place.
What keeps Singh in Franschhoek, what made him sell a beach house in Koh Samui in Thailand because that didn’t fit with the life he was building, is harder to quantify than investment returns. The light at the estate is different every single day, he says. Autumn light, spring light, winter light, rain light; each one changes the character of the property, reveals something that was there but unseen.
Beyond Franschhoek, the Leeu Collection brand has extended into Europe: Linthwaite House, a 36-room country retreat overlooking Windermere in England’s Lake District; and Collegio alla Querce, a 16th-century estate in Florence transformed into an 83-room luxury hotel, managed by Auberge Collection. Both properties are within Unesco World Heritage sites, reflecting Singh’s instinct for places of rare cultural and natural distinction.
Cape Town, it seems, is next. “I came for a football match,” he says, “and found a place that resonated with me. I cannot explain it any other way, other than exactly what happened.”