Introducing The Silo Hotel in Cape Town

It's always been very important for us to have a circle of the country. With safari at Romulo One, coastal property Birkenhaus, and a residence in the Winelands. We always needed and wanted a property in Cape Town. We've been waiting to find the perfect place and we really do feel like the silo ticks all the boxes. The Grand Silo building was built in the 1920s and at the time it was the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa. Grain was moved from all over the country and concentrated down and stored here and then put on ships and sent all the way up to Europe. If you had to choose a building for a hotel in Cape Town, you'd choose it to be in the waterfront. The building is unique because it sits up above the rest of the waterfront and we have 360 degree views. The building itself is beautiful because it's so industrial and yet the pillowed windows have given it this feature that everybody in Cape Town is talking about. There are 56 hand-cut panels of glass that form these incredible domes. Some of them are about five and a half meters high and they dome out about a meter. So when you're standing up against the window, you get this incredible vista where you can see down, up and to all sides. We didn't want to change the look. So we have fitted luxury into the industrial building with a few modern pieces and put lots of wonderful colours into it. This is going to be a very unique hotel, only 28 keys. It's very intimate like all of our other hotels. We are the only building that's 11 storeys high. Although our rooftop is on the 11th floor, it's equivalent of a 16 storey building because of the height of the floors. So we will always stand out like a lighthouse in the middle of the waterfront. The Grand Silo building is where we are housed. It is a large building and there are two tenants. It is the Silo Hotel and it also is home to the Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Mako is not just a first for Cape Town, it's a first for Africa. And it's going to be a world-class institution and will attract visitors from all around the world. As much as we would like tourists to come and stay with us, we really want Capetonians and South Africans to come and visit us and to be able to see Cape Town from this angle. I think the excitement is going to be tremendous.