The women’s toilet at the Rand Club is pretty and pink — with framed prints of birds and flowers playing off shades
of rose.
The loo is not extraordinary, but it is significant. After all, a women’s toilet is a very late addition to the 130-year-old Joburg icon. For more than 100 years the Rand Club was men-only, whites-only, members-only and haunted by ghosts of anti-Semitism. Add to this the spectre of Cecil John Rhodes, the man who is the reason the club exists but who has left it a damningly problematic legacy.
It’s a loaded history for an institution desperate to revive flagging membership and to boost its income. It must also find relevance for its old-world traditions and quirks in a modern age of competing priorities and disdain for stuffiness or anything that sniffs of colonial relic.
Brian Kent McKechnie, who is in his mid-30s, has been a member since 2009 and serves on the club’s board. He’s an architect, an urbanist, heritage champion and the fresh blood the club needs.
On a summer’s day McKechnie escapes the Joburg burn, retreating to the cool quiet of the mezzanine floor of the club’s Milner Lounge.
"I love this little corner," he says, interrupting himself momentarily. He rises from his wingback chair, set against oversized windows, to adjust a painting. He’s pedantic, but details matter because he and interior designer Joanne Kuny spent months last year refreshing the club’s look.
You can’t change history, but you can repurpose buildings and spaces so they reflect current values while keeping true to traditions and history
— Brian Kent McKechnie
It’s general maintenance, but also trying to reverse damage from a 2005 fire. Despite renovations and repairs at the time, McKechnie says the club never quite got back into its stride. Things got so dire that in 2015 the Rand Club closed and looked doomed to be sold off.
"We’ve tried to use the décor and design to upgrade the look and feel in a more contemporary way while telling the changing story of the club," says McKechnie.
Change has meant a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II survives, but one of Rhodes has been relegated to a smaller room that still bears his name. At the centre of the plush, carpeted grand central staircase is a stately rendering of Madiba. There’s Ardmore-designed Cole & Son wallpaper that offsets the new palette of military green on columns that stretch from the ground floor to the mezzanine ceiling. It also picks up rays filtering in from a skylight dome.
The dome is a temporary replacement as the original stained-glass one was destroyed in the fire and a permanent replacement remains a wishlist item.
"You can’t change history, but you can repurpose buildings and spaces so they reflect current values while keeping true to traditions and history," says McKechnie of this old gentleman’s club, born when the Randlords looked for respite from the dustbowl that was gold-mining-mad Joburg in the 1880s.
Along with Rhodes, the likes of Hans Sauer, Leander Starr Jameson and Lionel Phillips were flush with wealth and elevated social status. They bought the land on today’s corner of Loveday and Fox streets and declared the wedge of open veld the location for their club.
The 1887 club was a single-storey with a simple veranda. Two years later the Rand Club was rebuilt as a double-storey Victorian beauty with ornate turrets and a wraparound balcony. Members outgrew this too, leading to the present-day four-storey club being born out of the architectural designs of Leck and Emley. The Edwardian baroque-style building was completed in 1904 and has been a Joburg landmark ever since.
Inside is a ballroom, an armoury room, a billiards room and libraries with exquisite collections. Armchairs face the bookshelves for privacy. There’s also a little recess built into the shelves — a considerate footrest for when lunch has been good and scanning ink on paper becomes soporific.
The Rand Club stands as a vestige of a different time, of a mining legacy, and holds clues to the puzzle of early Joburg’s history. It’s said the club’s bar, at 32m, is the longest in Africa. The story goes that the planning for the Jameson Raid took shape here, over a few pints. The club was also targeted in the 1922 miners’ strike.
Now it’s the place where fashion designer David Tlale chose to launch a range last year. It’s regularly on the map of city heritage tours and is set for more reinvention that ticks boxes for adaptability, sustainability — also survival. Along with the exodus of big business from the Joburg CBD in the 1990s, ageing membership and the 2005 fire, the Rand Club’s recent story has been one of clinging on and clawing back.
"The club was once very rich but for about 30 years it used up all its resources without replenishing its coffers," says McKechnie of the pre-fire days.
Despite the fact the club had been barely operational for 10 years, it was only in 2015 that it cut back on a staff complement of around 100 people and closed for eight months. The club reopened in August 2016 with new funding and a strategy to match.
For Rick Currie (71), a fourth-generation member, some old ways only satisfy nostalgia — not enough to keep the club in the black.
It should be managed like a property, not as a club, he says. With a business background in property and auctioneering, Currie sees opportunities to optimise the club’s features for special events and functions. There’s also opportunity to auction off pieces from the vast stores of artefacts, artworks and furniture amassed over the years.
By the end of this first quarter the Rand Club will launch its business hub. The second floor is being transformed into facilities for hot-desking, meetings and mini-conferencing, with mod-cons and necessary tech. Also on the cards are plans to refurbish existing residential space for Airbnb-type rentals and to bolster reciprocity agreements with some premier clubs around the world. Rooftop space is being leased to an urban rooftop garden business and the club has already partnered with The Benders Arms for basic catering. It saves on investing in running and equipping its own kitchen.
In turn, The Benders Arms — itself a Joburg institution — has a new lease of life, relocating the pub-bistro from its basement location on Rissik Street to a section of the club previously reserved for members’ wives and female companions. (It was only in the early 1990s that the Rand Club opened its membership to women and people other than whites.)
These are income-generating initiatives; they’re also about repositioning the club in the public imagination and striking the right balance of exclusivity and aspiration with access and modern relevance.
Currie says: "Some contrived formality, say in a doorman who has presence, personality and gravitas, is part of what sets the tone and would still be appropriate for the Rand Club. At the same time things like strict dress codes can be toned down to be more smart-casual and professional, for instance."
Currie has seen a lot change in his more than 50 years of membership. Some things, though, have stayed the same.
He says: "Every time I bring a guest, they walk through the foyer and immediately have the experience that they’ve arrived somewhere grand, in something completely different from the rest of the city."
It’s exactly what Alicia Thompson felt when she set foot in the club the first time. "It was mind-blowing that this most splendid place existed in the inner city," says the hair stylist.
She and her husband are part of a growing brigade of suburban exiles eager to make inner-city life their reality. They created their dream double-storey penthouse in nearby Anchor Towers a few years ago. In 2010 a Rand Club membership felt like an obvious move, but being a nonwhite female then in her 30s she did question if the club had anything to offer her other than being drop-dead gorgeous.
But the couple joined. "I’ve met people from all walks of life, who are interesting and interested. There’s not the superficiality of caring about what you do; I think that circle of the club’s history has been closed," says Thompson. She’d still like to see more women members — they’re fewer than 10% of the club’s full-members of around 300 people — and to "bring in the city a bit more".
She says membership fees aren’t much more than the price of an upmarket gym contract, and "you’ll use your Rand Club membership more", she adds with a laugh.
With the Rand Club entering an era of reinventing itself to relevance, she may just be right.
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