Thebe Magugu revels in the space

In his design aesthetic, Thebe Magugu is less interested in decoration than in meaning. His work — whether cut in cloth or, now, built into space — is driven by a desire to hold onto things that might otherwise slip away: culture, memory, history. So when he was invited to design Belmond’s first-ever Designer Residence at Mount Nelson, it was never going to be a cosmetic exercise but a physical expression of his heart’s stories and those of the ancestor’s that inhabit his highly creative spirit. I went to the launch celebration of the suite expecting luxurious beauty — and left feeling blown away by his unique expression and attention to detail. His work has always seemed like it needed a footnote: his garments want to explain themselves, to situate you historically, socially, emotionally. So it makes a satisfying kind of sense that his latest project isn’t something you wear, but somewhere you enter.

When Magugu stood up to speak about his collaboration with the hotel, he began not with fabric or form, but with language. Thebe Magugu, he explained, translates loosely from Setswana as “Shield Treasures” — or, as he defines it: “He who protects our treasures.” His name reads like a job description, and for more than a decade now he’s used high fashion as a medium to interrogate his personal story and history, keeping it alive rather than embalmed.

The Thebe Magugu Suite and its companion space, Magugu House, are his debut interior project. Rather than tiptoeing around the hotel’s legacy, Magugu has stretched and unsettled it.

“My practice has always been rooted in preservation,” Magugu says. “A commitment to keeping culture, memory, and history from slipping away.” What’s changed is scale. “With the suite and Magugu House, I’ve been focused on building an environment that holds all these ideals.” The result isn’t a hotel room so much as what he calls a “distilled universe” of his brand — an Afro-encyclopaedic space that allows you to walk through his thinking.

The Mount Nelson was never going to be a neutral canvas anyway. Pink, poised and unapologetically grand, it’s spent more than a century perfecting hospitality as theatre. Magugu’s response to this weight of legacy wasn’t reverent or rebellious, but something more interesting. “There was a mixture of humility and excitement,” he says. “The Mount Nelson holds so much history, so the responsibility was clear. What excited me most was the invitation itself — it signalled trust, and a willingness to imagine luxury differently.”

That reimagining takes the form of what the designer calls an “Afro-English” aesthetic: English grandeur held in creative tension with African sensuality. Designed with Cape Town firm StudioLandt, the suite unfolds across two floors. Downstairs, a lobby leads into a lounge and dining area; upstairs, a bedroom opens onto a private terrace with views of Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. The colour palette is unusual and deeply confident — oxblood, dark moss green, warm harvest tones — while textured wallpaper depicts rural women walking through hills, receding into the distance like a memory.

The details tell the real story. Bedposts echo the shape of wooden beads. A flat-screen television is framed in carved wood until it becomes an ornament rather than an intrusion. Drawings of African queens line the staircase, watching you ascend. A forest-green couch is pleated like fabric — a nod, Magugu says, to the church he attended as a child with his grandmother. “Instead of a flat suede, we worked the material to pinch and pull across the surface,” he explains, “to create a beautifully pleated couch.”

This is where Magugu’s current fascination with magical realism quietly asserts itself. “Yes, there’s the history and culture,” he says, “but adding a speculative component of my own imagination is really exciting. It’s about dreaming up new realities and proposing new ways forward.” Culture, he believes, must be stretched — not erased — especially for younger audiences who might mistake the unexplored for the obsolete.

His inspirations roam freely across disciplines, and he no longer apologises for that. “My energy is concentrated in creating a broader ‘universe’ around the work — where fashion meets art, design and public cultural exchange,” he says. Magugu House, conceived as part concept store, part cultural institute, reflects that ambition. “I’m unbothered by the quote ‘jack of all trades’,” he adds cheerfully. “I am the exact opposite of focused.”

Designing interiors, he discovered, came with sobering new responsibilities. “A dress on its own can’t physically harm you,” he says. “But a space ill-designed has the ability to really hurt you.” Fire regulations, circulation, safety — all part of the learning curve. “Actual lives are at stake.” He found it exhilarating rather than limiting, expanding his visual language and, he says, making him a better creative.

Heritage, hospitality and welcome sit at the heart of the project. A pendant light, one of his proudest designs, takes its shape from the Mokorotlo — the Basotho conical hat inspired by Mount Qiloane in Lesotho. “The pendant sits in complete modernity in its sleek futurist outside,” he says, “yet still holds its cultural integrity by lining its interior with straw.” Elsewhere, a plush white rug carries silk hoof-prints of a rhebok, as if the antelope passed through while you weren’t looking.

What does Magugu hope guests feel when they arrive? Not spectacle. Not awe. “I wanted it to feel like home,” he says — something hotels famously struggle with. “Sometimes hotels feel like a third space; they make you feel like you are in limbo. The most important feeling I want guests to have is a sense of grounding, which we achieved by showing so many examples of the brilliance of the hand.”

The Mount Nelson has always been a place of arrival. With the Thebe Magugu Suite and Magugu House, it becomes something else: a place of meaning. This isn’t decoration. It is preservation, made inhabitable. Luxury, here, isn’t excess —it’s protection — shielding treasures.