Twenty-one years after the opening of GrandWest Casino and Entertainment World in Cape Town, the complex’s Grand Hotel is to be spruced up with a multimillion-rand investment from Sun International.

It’s the first phase of a five-year master plan for GrandWest in Goodwood that will include a separate 250-room, four-star conference hotel and a shopping centre. 

This week, the Sun International hotel chain announced an initial investment of R122-million to expand the Grand Hotel. 

The entertainment complex is not only the group’s busiest, it’s also the largest casino and leisure complex in South Africa, followed by Time Square in Pretoria (another Sun International property) and Montecasino (a Southern Sun/formerly Tsogo Sun property). 

Barring the Covid lockdown, the four-star Grand Hotel has operated at full capacity since it opened, with rooms booked well in advance, explained Mervyn Naidoo, the general manager of GrandWest. “This hotel has had 100% occupancy every single day. Granted, it’s only 39 rooms. We’ll be extending the hotel with 68 rooms. Most importantly, we will have the facilities that we always wanted.”

These will include an indoor heated swimming pool, a nail bar and a gym.

Naidoo said GrandWest was starting to return to pre-Covid levels, with fully operational facilities. Attractions include the resumption of the Jackson Hall jazz club, a “Cape Town institution”, and the opening of Thava, a popular Johannesburg restaurant group. 

The entertainment destination that centres Cape Town is now coming back to life,” Naidoo said, and the Arena, which runs from Monday to Saturday, is set to host Joe Barber, Craig David, Foreigner, Sting, OneRepublic, The Lumineers, Counting Crows and others this season.

Cape Town mayor Geordin Lewis-Hill has voiced his enthusiasm for the project, one of the first big projects to get off the ground after the Covid pandemic. 

“That is so important for us. Cape Town’s economy — more so than any other place in South Africa — is dependent on tourism, travel and entertainment. This has been a really difficult time for Cape Town, with tens of thousands of people having lost work in our city. Lots of small businesses in the travel, tourism, entertainment and hospitality space have not survived the past three years.” 

During the high season between now and March 2023, there will be 191 direct flights into Cape Town every week; 13 flights a week direct to Cape Town from the US, which has never happened before. 

“We see that confidence [is returning], visitors and events are coming back. We’ve had a record year. Never before have we had so many film shoots in Cape Town,” Lewis-Hill said.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

Celebration of heritage

Hassen Adams, the founding director and non-executive chairperson of Grand Parade Investments, said the architecture of GrandWest was a celebration of Cape Town’s heritage.

“When I was a child, the point of convergence for the city was the Grand Parade, which is why we called our company Grand Parade Investments.

“So, when we were looking at developing GrandWest, I wanted to replicate some of the buildings [of yesteryear]. I went with our architects to the National Archives in Gardens and we sat there for hours, looking at drawings of the old post office, the railway station and other historic buildings.” 

The designs settled on were scaled-down replicas of the past: the Grand Hotel was based on the hotel that was once on the corner of Adderley and Strand streets (built in 1894 and demolished in 1951), where Adams’s father worked as a barman. The Tivoli Music Hall (demolished in the 1930s), the Alhambra Theatre (demolished in 1970), the Old Railway Station (1905 to 1968), District Six and the old Cartwright’s Corner building (demolished in the 1970s) served as inspiration for other parts of the complex, which are now all marked with plaques.

“We ‘flash-tracked’ this construction in record time. We built the casino in 11 months, with all the interchanges. People couldn’t believe it. But it was possible because of the dedication of the construction team.”

The pressure is now on to complete the first phase of the GrandWest hotel in 11 months, with Sun International’s development and infrastructure manager Anton Steenkamp saying the project needs to be handed over in October 2023. It will be hugely complex as the teams have to manage the impact on existing operations and customers. 

“The critical thing for us was to actually make sure that we keep the whole facade, keep the whole look and feel. The hotel will be extended into two identical three-storey wings on either side of the existing entrance and porte cochere. 

“We’ll have a ‘live’ hotel running as well, and [GrandWest] will need to make money over the Christmas period … but I think it’s a very exciting project.” 

The Salon Privé and existing hotel operations will continue throughout the construction and Steenkamp and his teams will have to manage the on-site noise, dust and vibrations. 

By this time next year, the hotel will be almost three times as Grand. And with large tracts of unused land around the existing complex, there’s significant room for growth. BM/DM