Tobias Alter came to Cape Town looking for a holiday apartment. He ended up with two heritage buildings and a hotel full of the city’s artists.
In the lobby of the Gorgeous George hotel, Cape Town is drawn across the wall in tile. Around 1,800 hand-painted ceramic tiles, inspired by Delft pottery, come together to form a map of the city. They are the work of the artist Lucie de Moyencourt, and they set the tone for everything else in the building.
The man behind the hotel came to Cape Town for something much smaller. Tobias Alter, a German working in property development, fell for the city on his first visit. “You often go to visit a beautiful place and then return to day-to-day life and lose touch with that place,” he says. “When I came to Cape Town, I wanted to buy myself a holiday apartment, just as a getaway to keep me coming back.”
Back in Germany, an apartment no longer felt like enough. “I wanted to make a commitment to coming back to the city, something that would keep me tied to the place,” he says. He found that commitment in two side-by-side heritage buildings on St George’s Mall, one Art Deco and one Edwardian, and decided to turn them into a hotel.
“I didn’t really know what I was stepping into,” he admits. “But my passion for design and beautiful things came into play.”
The local firm Urban Citizen Architecture kept the buildings’ bones: the grand architraves and cornices, oak floors, steel windows and brass doors. The interior designer Tristan du Plessis then exposed what had long been concealed, the raw concrete and steel beams, and let them run through both buildings as a single thread. In the 32 rooms and suites, Victorian details sit alongside a palette of blues, whites and greens. Around the hotel are vintage Jieldé lamps and a stainless steel table that stands on a pair of sculpted hands.
Much of it was made by South African designers and makers, and that was the point. Alter wanted a hotel that would pull Cape Town itself through the doors. “Attracting locals is a priority for me, as ultimately, I want to give the guests the chance to have an authentic experience without leaving the hotels,” he says. “Getting to know the locals is crucial to that.”
The building is, in a way, the holiday home he first came looking for. “There are a lot of private objets d’art at Gorgeous George, as I built the hotel in the way that I would have liked my house to look,” he says. “So it wasn’t just another property development, but more of a passion project.”
On the sixth floor, a bar, restaurant and pool deck open onto the rooftops of the city centre, with St George’s Mall and its coffee shops and galleries below. Cape Town is known for hotels by the sea. Alter built his in the middle of town.
He came looking for a reason to keep coming back. He built one with 32 rooms.
Words by Braeden Alexander.
