The word "Grace", in Cape Grace (as in the hotel in the V&A Waterfront), did not start life as a luxury label. It started as the name of a children's campsite outside Magaliesburg, one with faulty wiring, dead sewerage and a borehole that had run dry.
Mount Grace and the Cape Grace hotels trace back to a man named Chippy Brand. I came across his life story recently when I read his memoir, Branded By Grace, which is mostly an account of the unglamorous work behind a small, family-run hotel group. Very little of that work ever makes it into the public record.
It started in 1981, with no intention of becoming a hotel empire. A minister in Krugersdorp told Brand about a failed hotel in Magaliesburg — the Thatchstone Inn, later renamed the Rocberg Hotel — abandoned by its owners and in R30 000 debt.
The initial plan was to buy it for a song and turn it into a Christian children's campsite, funded by a handful of contributors putting in R2 000 each. Brand wrote the first cheque. They named the campsite Elhanan, Hebrew for "the grace or gift of God", which is where "Grace" as a brand name comes from.
The campsite was in shambles. Faulty wiring ran loose near the thatch roofing, the sewerage had failed and a borehole had dried up so badly that water had to be hauled up the hill in drums by hand. Only once the committee that owned the site started weighing up what fixing it properly would cost did the idea of building a hotel instead of a campsite come about.
The famous Mount Grace Hotel was born. A notable insight from the book is that Brand's need to hire staff who were practising Christians and capable of managing a commercial hotel was challenging. Brand openly acknowledges that the "Christian hotel" branding caused issues his team had not expected from the start.
In 1995, the hotel burnt down. An overheated amplifier left plugged in ignited the curtains in the Great Hall and the fire set the thatch roof alight.
It was an upsetting event for the family, who stood by and watched decades of work go up in flames overnight. Add to that an insurance dispute over a rental-income clause that didn't cover them properly and conference delegates who evacuated. Brand rebuilt the hotel with a corrugated iron roof instead of thatch.
From there the business grew into what Brand calls the Grace Collection: Mount Grace in Magaliesburg, the Cape Grace at the V&A Waterfront (designed with architect Louis Karol and financed through a brutal negotiation with Murray & Roberts and Syfrets Bank that required the family to put up personal collateral) opened in 1996.
A Rosebank property, known as The Grace, built through Johannic Properties with architect Guy Steenekamp, first opened as The Grace in 1997, built by the Brand family and modelled on a stately old London manor house.
It sits on the corner of Bath Avenue and Tyrwhitt Avenue in Rosebank, Johannesburg. According to Hyprop Investments' company history, it acquired the Grace Hotel and Offices for R32 million in 2003, with African Sun Hotels operating the property under lease until the hotel closed its doors in August 2011.
Property24 later reported that Tsogo Sun bought the property that year from JSE-listed Hyprop Investments for R85m. Tsogo Sun then spent R110m to transform the property into a five-star hotel, with David Muirhead Interiors leading the refurbishment. The hotel reopened on 9 July 2012 as 54 on Bath, the group's first Rosebank hotel, with 60 rooms, 12 executive rooms and three executive suites. Several original touches were kept as a nod to its history, including a Tinus de Jongh painting hung in reception.
The Cape Grace financing came down to a small hotel group negotiating with a bank's credit committee over interest rate structures and equity stakes, in an era when hospitality lending was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today.
The trouble started with the first construction draw. Contractor Murray & Roberts submitted a request for R5m and Brand took it to Syfrets Bank expecting a formality, since the architect and quantity surveyor had signed off on it.
Syfrets refused to release the funds, explaining that approval sat with the bank's credit committee. When Brand pushed back, pointing out he'd told the bank for three months that the family had no more cash to contribute, the committee said the equity had to come from somewhere.
From that demand came a "brilliant idea": pre-selling 10 flats in the hotel to raise the equity. Syfrets attached a condition Brand insists was never part of the original agreement: three of the 10 flats had to be pre-sold before more money would be released, with the proceeds counted as the family's equity contribution.
Brand scrambled to find buyers off-plan. Richard Laubscher, Nedbank's CEO at the time, agreed to buy one of the flats as a director's flat for the bank. A Mr Cohen, phoning from Zimbabwe, took two more.
When Murray & Roberts came for the next R10m cash injection, the bank once again said three more flats needed to be sold. And as if by the Grace of God, further buyers followed and the loan agreement was finally signed.
In the end, the hospitality empire didn't survive as a family business. In 2001, personal debt from the Cape Grace financing pushed Brand to sell his 50% share in the hotel to Meikles, a Zimbabwe hotel and retail group.
By 2006, with succession and cash flow putting immense financial pressure on him, he sold the rest of the Grace Collection. He writes about the sale without much bitterness, more as a natural handover than a loss.
The hotel itself has changed hands more than once since then.
According to a press release by Kasada Capital Management, in March 2022, Kasada Capital Management, a private equity platform dedicated to African hospitality and backed by Qatar Investment Authority — the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar — alongside global hotel group Accor, acquired the Cape Grace for its debut fund, marking Kasada's first South African acquisition.
Kasada was launched in 2018 and has since built a portfolio of around 20 hotels across seven African countries, all operated under Accor's various brands. After a nine-month renovation led by London design firm 1508 London, the Cape Grace reopened in May 2024 as the first Fairmont-branded hotel in South Africa, now trading as "Cape Grace, A Fairmont Managed Hotel". The hotel has 112 rooms and suites, each with its own views of Table Mountain or the working Waterfront harbour.
Before any of this, Brand spent a stretch in the late 1970s working as a contractor at Sun City, building the golf course under American designer Ron Kirby and later helping manage the blasting work needed to carve the hotel's foundations out of solid volcanic rock, against a brutal deadline set by Sol Kerzner.
It's a small, colourful detail about the iconic Sun City resort built by a larger team under Kerzner's vision and risk, not a claim to any credit for what Sun City became. But it's a fun footnote about the man who later spent a decade fighting fires, insurers, and bank committees to keep a small Christian hotel in Magaliesburg alive and later transformed it into a boutique hospitality empire.
Much of what Brand built in his Grace Collection of Hotels sets the standard for South African boutique hospitality. Personalised guest liaison, hands-on staff training and the idea that a small hotel competes on service rather than scale. That came from hoteliers working it out on the fly in the 1980s and '90s.
The big-name resort developers get the tourism campaigns and the biographies. The ones who do it with heart through crisis and a currency collapse are remembered by almost nobody.