The first guests checked in on Tuesday, October 27, at Quay 7, and with them EDITION got its first address in Africa. The Cape Town EDITION stands on the V&A Waterfront’s working harbour, facing the precinct’s new superyacht marina with Table Mountain behind it. The hotel has 142 guest rooms and suites, five restaurants and bars, a spa built below sea level, and a price tag that tells its own story: about R1.1 billion invested by the V&A Waterfront Company, or roughly R7.7 million for every key.
That figure makes it the largest investment in a single hotel property in South Africa since the building boom around the 2010 World Cup. The seven-storey building went up in two years on a site that has loaded and unloaded ships for more than a century, and its ballroom holds 200, which gives the Waterfront a new room for the gala season as well as a new hotel.
Six million bricks, and a gallery’s worth of African art
Shanghai-based Neri&Hu designed the building with Cape Town firm StudioMAS, and the facade is the argument for the whole project: more than six million bricks, laid by hand in shifting patterns that pick up the warehouses and grain silos of the old harbour. At the centre of the building sits The Drum, a cylindrical atrium open to the sky, with a spiral staircase climbing to a viewing platform.
Inside, the art is not decoration. Cape Town gallery Southern Guild curated a collection that runs from Zanele Muholi to Usha Seejarim and Chuma Maweni, and Design Network Africa sourced work from makers across the continent. The rooms carry rugs woven by Shuttleworth Weaving in KwaZulu-Natal. At the top of the range, the Harbour Suite measures 112 square metres and the penthouse 240, and six private residences sit inside the same building. “We want The Cape Town EDITION to feel as relevant to a Capetonian as it does to someone visiting the city for the first time,” said Leonie Andereya, the hotel’s general manager.
Shale, a punch room, and a spa below the sea
Executive chef Phil Carmichael, who cooked at Berners Tavern at The London EDITION, leads five food and beverage venues, with South African beverage specialist George Hunter on drinks. At Shale, the signature restaurant, the menu works with regional farms and fisheries: Saldanha Bay mussels with curry velouté, seaweed salad and braised black rice, meats dry-aged in-house, and a wine list that leans South African. EAVE shares the roof with the heated pool deck. Downstairs, the Punch Room revives the punch house, and its signature Brandewijn mixes brandy with Pinotage, rooibos, pineapple, lemon and winter spices, a recipe that reads like the Cape’s trading history in a glass.
The spa sits below sea level: five treatment rooms and a couples’ suite, sauna and steam room, infrared beds and recovery equipment, with treatments built on Omorovicza skincare. A daily program of yoga, breathwork and sound baths runs beside the rooftop pool, the gym never closes, and a rooftop Vantage space joins the ballroom and meeting rooms for private events.
George Fleck, EDITION’s global brand leader, called Cape Town “one of the world’s most compelling cultural capitals.” V&A Waterfront CEO Graham Wood read the opening as a vote of confidence in the city’s future. Opening week will fill the restaurants first. The test that matters is whether Capetonians claim the place as their own, and a hotel that hangs Muholi on its walls and pours Pinotage in its punch has been built, brick by hand-laid brick, to make that claim easy.
The Social Register’s event directory tracks the season’s galas, benefits, and society evenings. Plan your next evening there.
