Maison Marble and the New Shape of a Night Out in Sandton

The founders of Marble are opening a hotel and an entirely new restaurant inside Sandton’s R2 billion Olympus development. Maison Marble will sit two floors below the penthouses with thirty two rooms. Jellyfish will run from daylight into the early hours with the city spread out beneath it. Neither will feel like anything they have done before, and that is precisely the point.

How a petrol station in Rosebank explains everything Marble Hospitality is about to do next

Think about the last hotel that actually made you feel something. Not the one with the best thread count or the most obliging concierge, but the one where the lighting in the lobby at nine in the evening made you want to stay for another drink rather than go up to your room.

That feeling is difficult to manufacture and almost impossible to fake, and it is the thing David Higgs and Gary Kyriacou have been chasing since they lit the first open flame at Marble in 2016. They have chased it through Saint and through Zioux, two rooms that share an owner and almost nothing else. They chased it into a petrol station in Rosebank, of all places, and turned Pantry by Marble into somewhere people genuinely want to stop. Now they are chasing it into a hotel.

Source: Daily Investor Article

Maison Marble and the view from the eighteenth floor

Maison Marble will occupy two full floors of The Apollo, the 16 storey tower inside Olympus Sandton, positioned just beneath the penthouses. Thirty two rooms, which is small enough that the staff will learn your name by the second morning and small enough that the place can have a mood rather than a policy.

Next door, The Athena rises 24 storeys and carries the eating and drinking. A Marble restaurant on the 18th floor. A Pantry by Marble at street level for the coffee you need before anything else happens. The R2 billion development is backed by Tricolt and Growthpoint and sits in the Sandton Summit precinct, anchored by Discovery’s head office, though none of that will cross your mind while you are looking at the view.

“The hotel will be called Maison Marble,” Kyriacou said. “For us, it’s not about just opening a hotel and putting the Marble name on it.”

“We want to take everything we’ve learnt from hospitality, restaurants, food, design, service and how people want to feel when they go out and bring all of that into a hotel.”

A restaurant has a few hours to get you. A hotel has your morning, your late night, the hour you spend working from a corner of the bar because your meeting moved. It is a far more exposing brief.

“With a restaurant, we might look after you for three or four hours. At Maison Marble, we get to look after you for an entire stay, and that gives us a completely different opportunity to create an experience,” Kyriacou said.

Luxury without the hush

There is a version of luxury that asks you to lower your voice. Heavy drapes, a hushed reception, a member of staff appearing at your elbow the moment you reach for anything. Plenty of people still want it. Fewer of them are under fifty.

“I think luxury has changed,” Kyriacou said. “It doesn’t need to be stiff or overly formal. It can be beautiful and sophisticated but still have energy, warmth and personality. The small details matter.”

Anyone who has spent a Saturday in Johannesburg recognises what he is describing. This is a city that dresses properly and then behaves informally, that treats dinner as the beginning of the evening rather than the whole of it, and that has very little patience for rooms where you are expected to perform seriousness. The best places here are the ones with a pulse. The ones that are beautiful and also, crucially, fun.

Jellyfish, from lunch to late

The other reveal is the restaurant, and it arrives with a name nobody has heard before.

“The restaurant is going to be called Jellyfish, which is also a name we haven’t revealed before,” Kyriacou said.

“One thing we’ve always tried not to do is copy ourselves. Marble, Saint and Zioux are completely different experiences. There’s no point in creating another Marble just because Marble works.”

“Jellyfish will be sophisticated but fun. It needs energy. It needs to work through the day and then change as you move into the evening. And with the position and the views over Sandton, we have an incredible canvas to work with,” he said.

A room that shifts character as the light goes is the hardest thing to get right in this business and the most rewarding when it lands. Lunch that feels unhurried and bright. The hour around six when the music changes register and the room begins to fill with people who have come straight from somewhere else. Then the part of the evening where nobody is checking the time and the lights of Sandton are doing most of the work.

Get that transition wrong and you have a lunch spot that empties at eight. Get it right and you have the only kind of restaurant that really matters, the one people return to for entirely different reasons in the same week.

Everything within walking distance of your room

The quiet pleasure of Olympus is proximity. Coffee downstairs, dinner upstairs, a bed two floors below the penthouses, and none of it requiring a car or a plan.

“You’ll have Maison Marble, Jellyfish and Pantry all in the same development, but each one needs to stand on its own,” Kyriacou said.

That last part is the promise worth holding them to. Three venues under one roof only works if you never feel you are eating the same idea twice.

Why they are in no rush

Maison Marble is intended as the first of a collection, eventually, though Kyriacou sounds entirely untroubled by when.

“First, we need to make Maison Marble exceptional. We need to learn from it, understand what works and establish what our version of a luxury hotel really is.”

“After that, if we find the right location and the right partners, absolutely, we would like to do more. But I don’t want to take Maison Marble and copy and paste it somewhere else.”

Which is the right instinct, because the hotels people become sentimental about are never the ones that exist in nine cities. They are the ones that could only be where they are.

“For me, the exciting part is that the group is starting to become much broader than restaurants,” he said. “Restaurants taught us hospitality. Pantry is teaching us retail and convenience. Maison Marble takes us into hotels.”

“It’s always about asking how we can take something people already know and make the experience better,” Kyriacou said.

The closing thought

The places that change how a city goes out are rarely the ones that announce themselves as changing anything. They are the room your friends keep suggesting, the breakfast you think about on the drive home, the hotel bar you end up in without having planned to. Marble did it to dinner. Pantry did it to something as unglamorous as filling up the car. Whether Maison Marble and Jellyfish do it to a night in Sandton will come down to the small things, the temperature of the room at ten in the evening, the second morning when someone remembers how you take your coffee.

“We take what we do seriously, but we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously,” Kyriacou said. “I think you can be sophisticated and still have fun.”

For a city that has always known how to do both at once, that may be the most Johannesburg thing about it.