Tatler - The Hot Ticket: Johannesburg
February 2013

Jo’burg is Africa’s urban trump card, a funky financial juggernaut where everybody and their Ridgeback wants to move in and make it. Artistic enclaves are springing up faster than you cn shout BRAAI!, such as pioneering Arts on Main, a block of tarted up warehouses in the once no-go, now must-go, east. It’s expanding fast and turning into Maboneng Precinct, a downtown neighbourhood for creative types, media types, wear-silly-hat types. Plus fashion-forward travellers by the bucketload. It’s awash with artist studios (including William Kentridge’s) and galleries (like an outpost of Cape Town’s Goodman Gallery), as well as the David Knut Bookstore, Black Coffee fashion and the spankingly new Museum of African Design. For one-stop, one-of-a-kind shopping, zoom across town to the dozens of cute boutiques and restaurants that make up 44 Stanley, such as neo-tribal fashion label Tiaan Nagel, and Lucky Fish peddling vintage knick-knacks. Then head south for a souvenir blitz at Amatuli’s three floors of glorious goodies -- Congolese beaded chairs, cushions printed with Barack Obama graphics and colonial maps in roughly hewn wooden frames. Rest your head at 12 Decades, Maboneng’s art hotel, where each room reflects a period of South African history (cleverly handling the apartheid era). If it’s Sunday, shuffle out of bed and round the corner Market on Main for spicy street food and Brick Lane-style stalls. A more refined refuge is brand-new: the Residence -- as gentile as your granny -- in leafy Houghton, with a pool and a tennis court, and a mere pitch away from the golf course. No artsy overload -- just lots of lovely antiques, tinkling piano keys, roaring fires and crystal bowls brimming with lollipops. It’s already so popular it has doubled the number of rooms -- and guests can cruise there in the hotel’s Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. Trump that.