A South African designer with a Paris show and an LVMH Prize has now taken a suite and a shopfront at Cape Town's pink hotel. The tenth year of his label, the first time he has put his hand to a building.
Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, has stood at the head of the Company's Garden since 1899. The walls are pink, the palms are tall, the lawn is always cut. Thebe Magugu set up his fashion house in Johannesburg in 2016, won the LVMH Prize three years later, and has shown in Paris since. This year he carried the work into the hotel.
The suite
The Thebe Magugu Suite sits along Palm Avenue, in one of the hotel's older wings. Magugu worked on it for two years with the architecture and design practice StudioLandt. It runs over two floors. The lower floor reads as a residence, with a lounge, a dining area, a wet bar and seating for small gatherings. The upper floor is for sleep.
The references are southern African and made by hand. The dining pendant lights are drawn from the Basotho hat. The dining chairs echo the rounded forms of traditional pottery. Textiles run through the rooms in colour blocks that read like Magugu's own collections. The suite is held to the hotel's heritage shell rather than fighting it.
The Thebe Magugu Suite at Mount Nelson · Courtesy of Belmond
Magugu House
The second part of the project sits closer to the street. Magugu House Cape Town is a concept store and a working room for the wider African creative scene, open to anyone who walks in. The space carries his collections and acts as a stage for talks, exhibitions and partnerships with other designers across the continent.
The opening exhibition is called By Our Own Hands. Magugu co-curated it with the contemporary African art specialist Julia Buchanan, in partnership with Southern Guild, the Cape Town and Los Angeles gallery. The first show brings work by Zanele Muholi and Zizipho Poswa into the room, two artists whose practice runs through photography, ceramics, performance and protest. The exhibition was on through the end of April, Tuesday to Saturday, ten to six.
A hotel suite that reads like a residence, a shop that reads like a gallery. The hotel keeps the keys.
The Splendid EditBelmond has been moving in this direction for a while. Mount Nelson sat at no. 73 on the World's 50 Best Hotels 2025 extended list. The group's wider house style, slow luxury they call it, has lately pulled in chefs, gardeners and designers whose work shapes a property rather than decorates it. A two-year residency from a working fashion house is a step further along the same line.
The house
The wider hotel is the reason any of this works. Nine acres of gardens, 198 rooms and suites, the Planet Bar, Lord Nelson Restaurant, the new marine restaurant Amura by Angel Leon, a spa, two heated pools, tennis. The grounds run from the Company's Garden up toward Table Mountain. The view from the front lawn is the one the city has tried to keep for over a century.
Cape Town is at its softest in the southern winter. Cooler air, low rain, an empty pool in the late afternoon. The cellar door circuits open out into the Cape Winelands, an hour east through Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. The Magugu Suite sleeps two, with a sofa bed for a third, and the rest of the hotel is exactly where it has always been.
Magugu House Cape Town · Courtesy of Belmond
The Magugu project is the kind of move a heritage hotel makes when it wants to keep its head in the present. The pink walls hold; the suite behind one of them now reads in Magugu's hand. The cellar door circuit and the Table Mountain view are still there, with one new reason to come into the city before you go.
The Thebe Magugu Suite and Magugu House Cape Town are open now at Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town. Bookings and concept-store visits through belmond.com.
Photography courtesy of Belmond · Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, Cape Town