Private members’ clubs have quietly become one of the more telling indicators of a city’s economic weather. Where wealth accumulates, discretion tends to follow, and Cape Town’s latest additions to the genre confirm that the city has moved well beyond its usual currency of sea views and sauvignon blanc. What is emerging instead is a network of rooms designed for people who already have access to most things, and who now want somewhere considered enough to meet in.
The most recent arrival is Maison Grace, which opened on the private quay of the Cape Grace hotel at the V&A Waterfront on 14 August. Developed by Kasada Capital Management, the Africa-focused hospitality investment firm backed by the Qatar Investment Authority and Accor, it is being described as the city’s first genuinely curated private members’ club. Membership begins at around R30,000 a year before initiation fees, with reduced rates for members under 35, and entry is by referral rather than open application.
The interiors lean on restraint rather than spectacle. Founding partnerships with Southern Guild, the contemporary African design gallery, bring rotating exhibitions directly into the club’s living spaces, so the art changes as often as the guest list. There are discreet meeting nooks intended for the kind of conversation that shouldn’t carry beyond the room, a wine list built around individual producers rather than recognisable labels, and a weekly programme of private dinners, panel discussions and small live acoustic sessions. Little of it is designed to photograph well. Most of it is designed to be remembered by the people actually in the room.
Kasada’s connection to the neighbouring Cape Grace, a Fairmont-managed hotel overlooking the yacht marina with its own long history of quiet, high-touch service, lends the club an operational pedigree that newer ventures often lack. It is, in effect, an extension of a hospitality culture that already understood restraint before restraint became fashionable again.
A few kilometres away, in the older quarters of the city centre, The Cape Town Club offers a different register of the same instinct. Founded in 1858 and housed in a Sir Herbert Baker-designed building on Queen Victoria Street, the club has spent the past year restoring its Victorian interiors while widening its membership base considerably. The Mandela Bar and the ornately detailed Smuts Room sit alongside a first-floor ballroom, a members’ library and The Gallery, its in-house restaurant, with a jazz room, the Mara Lounge, in development. General manager Phil Thurston has spoken of a deliberate shift toward diversity of profession and age among members, a departure from the club’s historically narrower, more hierarchical membership of a century ago.
That two such different clubs, one newly built around discretion and design patronage, the other rebuilding itself from within a heritage shell, have found footing in the same city within months of each other says something about where Cape Town now sits. Johannesburg’s Rand Club, founded in the same era as the Cape Town Club, remains the reference point further north, its chandeliers still lit despite a disputed municipal rates revaluation that has pushed up its running costs. Across the continent, comparable clubs are opening in Lagos and Nairobi, driven by a similar cohort of entrepreneurs and investors who want somewhere private to convene.
What distinguishes the Cape Town model, so far, is its refusal to lean on ostentation as a selling point. Neither club advertises. Neither courts visibility. The value, as members of both would likely argue, lies precisely in not needing to be seen. In a city that has spent two decades marketing its views, its wine estates and its restaurants to an increasingly global audience, these rooms represent something quieter: proof that Cape Town’s wealthy no longer need a vista to feel they have arrived. They need a door, and the right person on the other side of it.