Weylandts Pulls Up a Chair at The With, Its First Bar, for Design Week

For more than sixty years, Weylandts furniture has lived in other people’s homes, quietly present at dinners and late conversations the brand never saw. For Design Week 2026, the South African design house opens The With, an intimate bar at 107 Castle Street in Cape Town. It is a short lived room with a lasting idea behind it: that good living depends less on what you own than on who sits beside you.

The Brand Walks Into the Room

Weylandts has always made the setting rather than the scene. Its sofas, tables and chairs end up in living rooms across the country, but what happens around them, the arguments over wine, the long Sunday lunches, the guest who stays too late, has always been someone else’s story. The With changes that, if only for a few weeks in October.

Designed by StudioLandt, the bar on Castle Street gives the brand an uncommon vantage point on its own work. Instead of supplying the furniture for other people’s gatherings, Weylandts becomes the host.

“Our furniture has always lived in other people’s homes, which means we have rarely seen what happens around it,” says Anna Weylandt, who now leads the brand. “The With lets us be in the room for once. I hope people sit down next to someone they know, or someone they are about to meet, and leave feeling that good living is mostly about the company you keep.”

Sixty Years of Living Among Things

The project is less a departure than a natural extension of a long held philosophy. Since Edgar Weylandt opened his first store in Windhoek in 1964, the family has understood good living as a matter of connection: to people, to place, to nature and to oneself.

That thinking already runs through the business, from the studios that shape interiors to showrooms built for experience rather than browsing, and an approach to craft and design that has made the name familiar in South African homes. The With simply asks what that ethos looks like when the brand steps out from behind the product and into the conversation.

A Word That Cannot Stand Alone

The name is a deliberate piece of grammar. A preposition cannot stand on its own; it needs something after it, whether a person, a place or a night. The room works the same way. It is only finished once there are people in it.

That logic shapes the format. Seats are limited and offered in two hour sittings, keeping the room small enough for conversation to carry across the bar rather than disappear into it. Cocktails are named after beloved pieces from the Weylandts catalogue, served with bar snacks alongside, and drinks are poured in partnership with Moët Hennessy.

It is a quietly clever idea. Naming a drink after a chair or a table turns the order into a small act of recognition, and gives long time admirers of the brand a different way to encounter pieces they may already live with.

The Order of Events

Beyond the nightly seatings, a short programme runs through Design Week. The Opening Evening on 17 October and an evening hosted with Soho House on 21 October are by invitation.

For the public, the calendar is as follows:

• 22 October 2026, 16h00 to 18h00: In Conversation, with Anna Weylandt and Alexa Schempers on design, making and what it means to live well.
• 22 to 31 October 2026, 16h00 to 18h00, 18h00 to 20h00 and 20h00 to 22h00: The With, a two hour seat at the Design Week bar, with drinks and small plates.
• 23 October 2026, 20h00 until late: The With: Live with Muneyi. A live performance by Muneyi followed by drinks and small plates, with a first drink on the house and The Kunda, a brown buttered Hennessy spin on an old fashioned.
• 24 October 2026, 22h00 until late: the Design Week Afterparty, closing a week of design, craft and connection.

Bookings are open at thewith.bar.

Why a Furniture House Needs a Bar

Brands across the luxury world have learnt that a showroom can only say so much. Increasingly, the most persuasive argument a design house can make is an atmosphere: a room people choose to spend an evening in, rather than a space they walk through on a Saturday morning. Weylandts’ move into hospitality, however temporary, speaks to that shift, and does so with a distinctly local accent. A South African family business with Namibian roots is using Cape Town’s design calendar to make a case for how people here want to gather.

After the Last Seating

The With will close at the end of October, and the furniture will go back to doing what it has always done, sitting patiently in other people’s homes. But the idea behind the room should outlast the fortnight. Weylandts has spent six decades making the objects people live among. For a few evenings on Castle Street, it gets to see what they are for.