The Silo Hotel

The Story

iz Biden spent a career in fashion before turning to hotels. She founded Jenni Button, sold it, and redirected the same eye toward spaces people would sleep in. The Royal Portfolio started with a bush lodge in 1999. By 2017, it had reached a 1924 grain elevator on the Cape Town waterfront — a fifty-seven-metre concrete column that had not moved a ton of grain since 1995 and had stood empty since 2001.

She hired Heatherwick Studio to cut eighty-two pillowed glass windows into the facade. She designed every room inside it herself, twenty-eight of them, no two alike, furnished by Moorgas and Sons and hung with over 300 pieces of contemporary African art. Below the hotel, the same building houses Zeitz MOCAA, the continent’s largest contemporary art museum. The building won the ArchDaily Building of the Year for cultural architecture in 2018 and a Dezeen Award the same year.

The result is a twenty-eight-room hotel where the building itself is the point. You do not stay at The Silo despite the grain elevator. You stay because of it.

Location

The V&A Waterfront splits into two districts. The retail end has more than 400 shops, chain restaurants, and enough foot traffic to remind you this is Cape Town’s most heavily visited tourist precinct. The Silo District occupies the opposite end, quieter and deliberately cultural, where the working harbour is still visible and cruise ships dock close enough to register.

The hotel sits at the centre of this second district, filling the upper six floors of a grain elevator built in 1924. Grain moved through this building for seventy-one years. The SS Willaston loaded the first export in November 1924; the M/V Anangel Wisdom carried the last in 1995. One of the rooms still carries its name. Operations ceased in 2001. The building stood empty for sixteen years before pillowed glass windows were set into the concrete facade and a hotel opened above what is now Zeitz MOCAA.

The relationship is vertical. The museum occupies the ground floors; the hotel rises above it. An internal elevator connects the two, which means you move between art and accommodation without leaving the building. From the upper rooms, the views split by compass: Table Mountain and the City Bowl south, the harbour and Table Bay north, Robben Island visible on clear days. The rooftop adds the full rotation. In winter, low cloud and dramatic skies push through the faceted glass panels in a way that conventional windows cannot produce.

This is not beachfront. Camps Bay is ten minutes by car, and anyone whose Cape Town trip begins and ends with sand should look there. What the Waterfront position delivers is walkability, urban energy, and a precinct that operates well into the night. Whether that is a feature or a compromise depends entirely on what you came for.

Rooms

We have stayed in hotels that claim individually designed rooms. The Silo is one of the few where the claim is literal. Liz Biden designed every room, not the concept delegated to a studio, but every colour, every fabric, every piece of furniture. Moorgas and Sons built the pieces by hand in their Cape Town workshop. Ardmore Design supplied the textiles from their studio in KwaZulu-Natal. Egyptian crystal chandeliers hang throughout. Each room is a separate composition built around whichever piece of the art collection Biden placed there.

Six categories across twenty-eight rooms, all sharing the pillowed glass windows that Heatherwick cut into the original concrete. The entry-level Silo Rooms are the most contained, compact by the standards of what follows, but with harbour views framed through the same faceted glass that defines every category. Lion’s Head fills one aspect; Table Bay the other. The glass panels change the light throughout the day, which is the single detail that separates these rooms from anything else in Cape Town.

The Duplex Suites take the building’s industrial height and make it the point. Two-floor layouts with mezzanine stairs, the kind of vertical space you associate with converted warehouses rather than hotel rooms. They connect to adjacent Duplexes for pairs travelling together. The Deluxe Superior Suites occupy the higher floors and carry the tallest pillowed windows in the building, the full expression of what Heatherwick did to this structure. Table Mountain or Robben Island, depending on orientation, through glass panels that rise high enough to make the room feel less like a hotel suite and more like the interior of a lantern.

For families, four Duplex Suites on Level 7 provide two bedrooms across the mezzanine layout, with the same window treatment and individually chosen art. All ages are welcome, though there is no dedicated children’s programme. The Royal Suites offer triple-aspect views across the ocean to Robben Island, and the Penthouse — the only room on Level 10 — faces Table Mountain through a panorama that wraps across the City Bowl and harbour in three directions. It connects to an adjacent Deluxe Superior Suite when additional space is needed.

The rooms inherit the building’s industrial skeleton, and that comes with characteristics worth understanding. The pillowed glass is transparent. With the lights on and blinds open, you are visible from outside. Automated blinds resolve this entirely but eliminate the view when closed; there is no middle setting. In some rooms, the bathtub sits at the window, which produces the hotel’s signature image and where the privacy trade-off is most apparent. The concrete structure also creates room shapes that are generous vertically but occasionally unconventional horizontally, and the mezzanine suites involve stairs that matter for anyone with limited mobility.

Communal Areas

The Vault sits beneath the hotel in what was once the base of the grain silos, a subterranean gallery space that rotates its exhibition of contemporary African artists twice a year. The works are for sale. This is not a display case for the hotel’s permanent collection but a functioning gallery with its own programme, and the shift in register when you descend from the lobby is immediate. Above, Biden’s maximalism. Below, white walls and whatever the current show demands.

Named for the first ship to load grain from this building in 1924, the Willaston Bar occupies Level 6 alongside reception, beneath a Haldane Martin chandelier. The bar functions as the hotel’s social anchor, the space where the day begins and where the evening settles in. Harbour views through the original structure. The Granary Café shares the floor. Chef Veronica Canha-Hibbert, who came from Ellerman House, runs a kitchen built on comfort rather than performance, generous and unfussy in a register that suits the building better than fine dining would.

The rooftop is the highest communal space and the most public. A pool reserved for hotel residents sits alongside a bar and terrace that are open to anyone. The 360-degree views: Table Mountain, harbour, City Bowl, the full Atlantic line, are the reason. At sunset, the terrace fills with visitors who are not staying in the hotel, and the atmosphere shifts from boutique intimacy to open-air bar. Whether you mind depends on whether you came for the view or the quiet, and the pool provides the partition if you need one. In summer, the south-easterly wind that Cape Town calls the Doctor reaches the terrace with nothing to break it.

A spa on Level 4 runs five treatment rooms with Ling and Black Pearl products. It serves the building well at this scale. Those whose trips centre on extensive spa facilities will find larger programmes at One and Only or Ellerman House, but at a twenty-eight-room property where the architecture is the primary draw, the spa exists to complement rather than compete.

An Art Concierge is on hand to walk you through the collection that lines the corridors and rooms above. The service is included.

Activities

The building is the programme. What distinguishes The Silo from properties that happen to contain art is that the architecture and the collection are not decoration. They are the reason you are here, and the hotel is organised to let you spend time with both.

The private art tour moves through the collection floor by floor, room by room. Zanele Muholi, Pieter Hugo, Mohau Modisakeng, Athi-Patra Ruga, Nandipha Mntambo: the names signal a collection operating at institutional weight. The tour runs sixty to ninety minutes and is included. What makes it worth the time is the context: the same pieces you passed in the corridor or glanced at above your bed take on a different meaning when someone who knows the artists explains what you are looking at.

The Vault, beneath the hotel, operates on its own rhythm, twice-yearly rotations of contemporary African artists whose work is available for purchase. It functions independently from the permanent collection, which means returning visits produce different exhibitions. The experience is self-directed and quiet, a deliberate contrast to the maximalist interiors above.

Zeitz MOCAA occupies the lower floors of the same building. Admission is separate and not included in the room rate, but an internal elevator connects the hotel directly to the museum, bypassing the public entrance. Under-eighteens enter free. The practical distinction is straightforward: you can move from your room to the largest contemporary art museum on the continent without leaving the building.

Beyond the building, Cape Town provides the wider context. Table Mountain, the Winelands, Cape Point, and the length of the V&A Waterfront are all arranged through the concierge. The hotel is the base; the city unfolds around it.