Welcome to the special “20th Anniversary” section of Top Yacht Design. Here, day by day, we present the best stories, yachts, and personalities we’ve covered over the past 20 years of Top Yacht Design, from 2006 to today.
Taken from Top Yacht Design no. 10/2017, pp. 126-131.
Destination: South African Dream
The Silo Cape Town has a whole new architectural identity.
Home to the State’s oldest port, Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred Waterfront is a bustling tourist haven and cultural hub awash with art galleries and designer stores. Since 1924, the V&A Waterfront’s skyline has been dominated by a huge 57-metre grain silo, which, until 2001, was used to store African grain before it was shipped to Europe and was once the largest construction of its kind in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eventually, the industrial cement structure fell idle and remained so until Liz Biden, founder and owner of The Royal Portfolio group of hotels and lodges (which includes the Royal Malewane in Kruger Park and Birkenhead House in Hermanus) came up with a visionary redevelopment idea. The result is The Silo Cape Town, an ultra-luxe designer hotel with an edgy but dazzling exterior by Thomas Heatherwick of the London-based Studio Heatherwick which currently has 25 different projects in hand spread across four continents. The idea was not just to retain the Silo’s industrial identity but to actually enhance it. In fact, the most radical idea was to clad the exterior in high-tech geometric “pillow” glass walls which are a perfect fit for the geometry of the floors of the building given over to the hotel. By day, they bulge outward, adding texture and drawing in light, but at night they turn The Silo Cape Town into a huge lantern that hangs like a beacon over the port.
The hotel itself takes up six floors of the grain elevator or working house section of the Silo complex. The remainder of the complex below and to the side is home to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, which opens to the public on September 22nd 2017 and will showcase the worId’s largest collection of contemporary African art. While the new glazing has modernised the building’s gritty industrial exterior, the interiors are where The Silo’s visual identity really comes into its own. Designed by Liz Biden, an inveterate traveller and supporter of African art and design, they are eclectic, playful and beautifully detailed from top to bottom. There are 28 guest rooms in all, including suites and a 187 square metre penthouse.
The décor is warm, jewel-like and awash with quirky designer and vintage pieces. “The building is modern and industrial so that the interior design contrasts that with the addition of comfortable, colourful and more playful touches,” Biden explains. All the rooms have their own balconies with expansive views ranging from Table Mountain to Lion’s Head, the V&A Waterfront and Robben Island. In room 603, the headboard features a stunning leopard print from Ardmore Ceramics first range of fabrics, designed by Halsted, an artist with a passion for turning African art into global design. All the rooms are bright and colourful – you’ll see yellow sofas on pink rugs, vivid dashes of purple from the Oslo chairs in the library, blue and green lacquered furnishings. There are also works by the eclectic African futurist Cyrus Kabiru as well as Mahau Modisakeng and Nandipha Mntambo, who are both sculptors and photographers.
Every single item, from the fabrics to the chairs, was hand-picked to help forge a new African cultural identity that is a move away from the traditional tribal, ethnic emphasis. Liz Biden commissions freely from African designers and artists. Her passion for art is reflected too in The Vault, the hotel’s own private art gallery that will showcase new, up and coming contemporary African artists on rotation biannually. Lastly, the hotel’s double-height lobby is dominated by a chandelier by the legendary furniture and interior pen, Haldane Martin, and 80 other glass lights hand-made in Egypt. Elsewhere Biden’s devotion to individuality leaps out in The Granary Café on the sixth floor, the Willaston bar and the Sky terrace with its infinity pool and city views. The Mother City officially has a new identity.
by Marina Citterio
photo The Royal Portfolio
