Picture, if you will, the scene. A sumptuous breakfast of Egyptian delicacies — fattoush, fava beans, cheese pastries, scrambled eggs with sliced peppers and a zingy little glass of fresh lemon juice — is being eaten by your reporter, with assistance from my girlfriend Lisa, underneath a mango tree in the sun-dappled gardens of my home-from-home in Egypt, the Villa Belle Epoque, Cairo’s first boutique hotel.

As scenes go, this one scores high on the idyllicometer. To top it all, above me a small bird — a finch, perhaps, or a sparrow — whistles a jaunty tune. And then... there’s no pleasant way of putting this . . . it poops on my top lip.

The hotel’s excellent young chef, Yasser Alawi, joins us at the table as I wipe away the last of the runny evidence from my T-shirt.

“We have a saying in Egypt,” he says with a grin. “We say, when a bird does that . . . you will buy new clothes.”

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Hmm, thanks. Fortunately, Yasser’s food is much better than his one-liners. In fact, everything at the Villa Belle Epoque is better than his one-liners.

WHEN WORD reached me that Cairo was getting its first bijou guest residence, I was surprised to hear that it had survived this long without one. The boutique hotel has become such a ubiquitous concept over the past decade that it’s in danger of becoming as much of a cliché as the faceless corporate chain hotel that it was meant to challenge.

But Cairo, up to now, has not had a boutique to call its own. Its hotels fall into three categories — “budget”, “midrange” and “How much?”. Unless you’re a backpacker or a banker, you’d probably treat yourself to something plusher than the hostels that can be found down side streets.

A lot of tourists to Egypt’s capital stay, it seems, in one of the reassuringly well-known names that line the banks of the Nile: Marriott, Four Seasons, Hyatt, Sheraton. They arrive in their coachloads, get back in their coaches for excursions and return in the evening, coach after coach, only to stand in the lobbies, covered in baseball caps and camera bags, looking lost without a flag-waving guide to take them to their room.

There are places nearer the pyramids at Giza — the Mena House Oberoi being the largest, and poshest, set behind security checkpoints and metal detectors and suffering from a faint whiff of the 1970s; and there are plenty of others dotted about — but they all offer similarly gold-and-marble accommodation, designed to cram in an awful lot of people at once (the Marriott, for example, has 1,090 rooms).

There is, though, only one Belle Epoque. The 13-room hotel, which opened yesterday, is in the leafy suburb of Maadi — which is a lot like Hampstead, in that it’s home to wealthy expats and Cairo’s society folk, who enjoy its peace, safety and location — 15 minutes from the colour and chaos of town by metro, half an hour’s drive from the airport, and 25 minutes around the ring road to Giza.

There are boutiques, bookshops and jewellers nearby, as well as restaurants and coffee shops, and you can amble, unmolested by hawkers, to the banks of the Nile in 20 minutes.

Tarek El Gendy and his Dutch wife, Beryl, bought a pair of 1920s villas in this area more than a year ago (they already run a travel agency, and two large, 100-people-plus cruise boats that they built from scratch to tour the temples on the shores of Lake Nasser, and six small, six-cabin dahabiyyas for more intimate trips down the Nile).

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