Thinking of hitting Cape Town’s newest hotel anytime soon? It may just be worth every penny.

For years we have been hearing about The Silo, but it wasn’t until its doors opened in March that the citizens of the Mother City realised just what all the fuss was about.

Now CNN has asked, “is this Africa’s best new hotel?”, and it’s no surprise that interest is through the roof.

Here’s a little intro to The Silo, from CNN:

From the outside, it’s an industrial monolith with an standout set of 25-feet-high convex windows overlooking the popular V&A Waterfront. The inside, by contrast, is a riot of color, pattern and glamor, with 28 individually designed rooms stocked with vibrant custom furnishings, oversized chandeliers and feature artworks.

Africa’s most expensive city hotel is based six floors above the soon-to-open Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) — touted to become Cape Town’s answer to Le Louvre and the Tate Modern — and features a spa, a panoramic rooftop bar with swimming pool and The Vault, the hotel’s very own private gallery of African contemporary artists in the building’s basement.

You want to know what it takes to be dubbed the continent’s most expensive hotel? Well, this is The Silo’s rate list for 2017:

Yes, you read right. The cheapest room is R12 000 in low season. Best get saving now, as prices are set to increase by 10% each year.

The Silo has long been a landmark of Cape Town and, according to CNN, the original silo was completed back in 1924. At nearly 61 metres tall, it once held the title as “sub-Saharan Africa’s tallest building”:

It was the premier grain silo for all of South Africa, where all of the country’s small farmers’ yields were deposited for export.

But that all changed in 2001 when the silo complex closed its operations, and South African hotelier Liz Biden saw a future opportunity:

“We have always wanted to open a hotel in our home city of Cape Town but we were waiting for the perfect property and opportunity to arise,” says Biden, whose hotel collection, the Royal Portfolio, features some of South Africa’s most luxurious lodgings.

It then took a collaboration between Biden, the V&A Waterfront complex, and London-based “starchitect” Thomas Heatherwick four years to make the hotel come to life.

If you know of Biden, you might know her hotel collection is famous for its eccentric elegance – and this look is once again featured in The Silo:

[A]ssorted bric-a-brac inspired from personal travels; color-blocked interiors where you might find handmade teal headboards alongside bubblegum pink dressers; Persian carpets; Egyptian crystal chandeliers (there are 80 in the hotel) and painted portraits by Africa’s premiere artists such as Frances Goodman and Jody Paulsen.

Check how Biden’s pops of colour are uniquely set against the backdrop of the City:

Beautiful. How gorgeous are those windows?

For those of you who cannot afford to stay in the hotel, it being Africa’s most expensive and all, there are amazing restaurant and bar options:

The Willaston Bar and Granary Cafe are based on the sixth-floor reception level, the former a vision of velvety jewel-toned booths with floor-to-ceiling window views of Cape Town’s iconic flat-top mountain.

The Granary Cafe is an informal dining space led by star South African chef Veronica Canha-Hibbert, and features a small raw bar selection, dishes such as steak frites and confit pork belly and a European-style Sunday Lunch menu.

The rooftop lounge/bar and swimming pool — with uninhibited 360-degree views of the urban landscape, the formidable Table Mountain, harbor and the Atlantic Ocean — are unsurprisingly in-demand during those sundowner hours, making The Silo Cape Town’s hottest hotel hangout of the moment.

Just need to wait for the weather to warm to venture onto the rooftop, though.

In the meantime, you can pop over here and check out everything you want to know about the hotel, which is clearly raising the bar on what Cape Town is all about.

[source: cnn]