With boxes still to unpack from the last time she moved house 27 years ago, new Western Cape premier Helen Zille hasn't yet made a decision about relocating to official residence Leeuwenhof.

However, she said on Friday that since a police VIP security detail descended on her suburban Cape Town home in the wake of her election, she was warming "more and more" to the idea.

Zille said her husband, academic Johann Maree, had had to move out of an office at the University of Cape Town recently, and grumbled about it for a week, "so I thought it wasn't the right moment to raise any other questions".

But with the kind of protection required for a premier, her narrow Rosebank street was now full of policemen, with people continually walking in and out of the house.

"Obviously the bathroom facilities have to be open to all who are in the street because there are no others. Which is fine, I have no problem with that, but it makes your house a kind of traffic circle," she said.

In addition, the house was on the road, and right next to a suburban railway line.

"I have absolutely no problem with other people using the house and using the facilities, but things are getting a little bit overcrowded at the moment, so we will see how we go from here.

"I have been warming more and more to the idea, frankly, of moving to Leeuwenhof.

"I would like to go and see what it is, I would like to take my family there, I would like them to see it and take a collective decision.

"But... an idea in principle is quite different to what Helen Zille gets around to. Because you know we moved into our house 27 years ago; we've still got some boxes that I have to get around to."

Leeuwenhof, in the city bowl, was originally a farmhouse dating to the time of the Dutch East India Company, and is now an imposing mansion looking out on rolling lawns.

It includes a slave quarter, which has been renovated and used to house an exhibition about slavery in Cape Town.

There is a legend that it is haunted by centuries-old ghosts, and Zille's predecessor, former premier Lynne Brown, claimed to have experienced a "presence" from time to time.