After nearly a decade of turning the Joburg food scene on its head, Marble Hospitality is set to fire things up in a new arena, with a 32-room luxury boutique hotel at Olympus Sandton.

The hotel will span two full floors of the Apollo tower of Olympus Sandton, a mixed development going up alongside the Discovery building. It’s valued at R1.736bn and is already the most successful residential project in South Africa by unit sales. More than R1.2bn worth of apartments sold within days. Construction begins this month, with completion set for late 2027.

For the Marble Hospitality crew, it’s a leap, but a logical one. The group began when chef David Higgs and Gary Kyriacou, Dino Constantinou and Irene Kyriacou lit the grills at Marble Rosebank almost 10 years ago. Since then, it has expanded into a constellation of busy, personality-filled spots: Saint, Zioux, Marble Cape Town, the theatrical Marble Circus events, and the ubiquitous Pantry. Moving into a project of this scale, inside a development that has broken sales records, signals confidence and a clear sense of momentum.

“We have always believed that hotels are the pinnacle of hospitality,” says Constantinou. “Once you get to the hotel, you have arrived.”

The opportunity unfolded the way many Joburg ideas do: casually, quickly and with characteristic audacity. Olympus Sandton developer Tricolt first approached Marble about opening a Pantry on the ground floor. Discussions grew to include a restaurant on the 18^th floor with 360-degree views. Then, in a coffee meeting between Constantinou, Gary Kyriacou and Tricolt’s Tim Kloeck, the idea came that shifted everything. What if they added a hotel?

“Tim absolutely loved it,” Constantinou recalls. “This was before the building even went on sale. Once it launched it sold like wildfire, but we had already secured our floors.”

A new kind of hotel

If restaurants are where Marble built its reputation for atmosphere and glamour, the hotel is where that philosophy is set to become fully immersive. Joburgers will agree that the city needs a property of this nature – especially one that is not simply geared to conference-goers who sleep, hit the breakfast buffet and fly off to meetings.

“There isn’t much here,” Constantinou says with the blunt affection of someone who has built his career in the city. “Other than the Saxon and the Four Seasons, both amazing but very much at one end of the scale, there is nothing in between. Overseas you have cool, edgy hotels everywhere. Here, slim pickings.”

He is right. Joburg is a bastion of exceptional creativity, but boutique hotels that reflect that spirit are remarkably scarce. There is a chasm where a design-driven, personality-filled stay should be.

Intimacy over scale

This is exactly the space Marble intends to occupy. Interiors director Irene Kyriacou has travelled widely and studied the feel and flow of places like the hugely popular Hoxton and W hotels, and the new breed of design-focused properties where the lobby is lively, the restaurant is a scene, and the hotel feels personal rather than corporate.

To that end, the hotel’s essence will be rooted in intimacy rather than scale. “What we are careful about is not being seen as a business traveller hotel,” Constantinou says. “Because it is only 32 rooms, we can touch every part of the experience. We want that feeling of home. We want to reach out before you even arrive. What do you like to drink? What do you like to eat? What temperature should the room be? What pillows do you want?”

Irene is shaping the look and feel, along with long-time collaborator Grid Worldwide, and she is especially excited to have award-winning designer Tristan du Plessis spearheading the development. His sexy, cool hotel projects span both South Africa and major international markets, and he brings deep understanding of what turns a hotel into a place people fall in love with.

The hotel will sit alongside the ground-floor Pantry, a poolside breakfast and daytime dining area, with a new high-end restaurant upstairs. The group will reveal more on that concept in the coming weeks. The development is designed to be the kind of place where, as Constantinou puts it, “you want to get dressed up, see and be seen and have fun”.

A proudly Joburg story

It is also a meaningful coup for the City of Gold, especially given the recent boom in tourism offerings in the Western Cape. Despite the national pull towards Cape Town, Marble remains quintessentially Joburg. The original Rosebank restaurant turns 10 next year and, in that decade, it has become part of the city’s cultural fabric. It is where you take overseas guests, where you go for sundowners and where you get the best sea bass in South Africa, even on a Monday night. (Ed’s note: we said what we said. It is the best.)

Then there is Pantry, the closest thing Joburg has to a town square. Teenagers, CEOs, families, gym-goers and night owls cross paths at all hours. “We still sit down and say, how on earth is this thing working so well?” Constantinou laughs. “But it is that sense of community. Joburg does not have a promenade or a piazza. Pantry became that.” A piazza with burrata and chenin available 24 hours a day, that is.

As Pantry expands towards 10 locations and Marble continues its Cape Town growth, the hotel arrives as a marker of how far the group has come and how much it still intends to do.

“We are actually just a small family business at the end of the day,” Constantinou says. “No outside investors. No outside funding. And somehow, we have managed to grow to this level.”

If Marble’s restaurants have taught Joburg anything, it is that the city responds to quality, ambition and joy. The Currency team has just one formal request for the new endeavour: life-size Marble focaccia pillows to rest our weary heads on, please.