Spindle, as tall and bendy as a blade, is the elegant new tower on the south side of Church Square, at the confluence of Plein and Spin Streets. Designed by the aptly named Robert Silke & Partners, it was here in the nineteenth century that silk spinning businesses sprang up. 

The stand-out feature is valet parking by a uniformed doorman

Spindle is sixteen storeys tall and is remarkably slender. Ground floor is the entrance but the stand-out feature is valet parking by a uniformed doorman. First to fifth are full-floor office chambers for professionals. Sixth to eleventh are full-floor mansion apartments. Twelfth to fifteenth are penthouse duplexes. There is no thirteenth floor.

The tower has a fairy-tale quality: Rapunzel, Rapunzel let down your hair. It is both edgy and sexy. 

Rapunzel lived alone in a tower, where she was held captive by her grandmother, who came up by climbing her long, beautiful hair. The girl ultimately did prefer to live alone in the tower, as life would be tranquil, peaceful, and rare.

"People can at once feel both excited and uncomfortable in a tower," says Silke, "A cottage can be pretty, but a tower is beautiful. This is because a tower can also be dangerous. It is only modern technology that allows it to stand at all." Of course the views are eye-shattering, the building seems to push away the sky. A tower brings all your senses into play.

Each flat has a whole floor and its own lift

Spindle is the modern version of a mansion apartment building, a word coined in the early part of the 20th century because the apartments are more like houses than flats. Each flat has a whole floor and its own lift. It is a house on top of a house with expansive dimensions, 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. 

The view from the penthouses (there are two) hits you in the face. The building pushes into the sky, it gives the finger, over-confident and svelte amongst the palaces of modern pastiche and facades the colour of poultry feed. 

By Cape Town standards Spindle is a skyscraper, but in Manhattan it would be "mid-rise". Far from the tallest building in Cape Town, its sleek proportions betray Silke's burning ambitions for it.

Spindle offers expansive views over Table Mountain and even Table Bay. The interiors are spacious with generous bedrooms and bathrooms en suite. 

The full-floor apartments range from 142m² to 150m², 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom. Penthouses are 257m² and 280m², similar to a house.

As an advertisement from the Edwardian age wrote when mansion flats were new on the market, "They combine the advantages of a private house, the freedom of a hotel and the luxury of a club."

"It has been designed for the worst to happen," says Silke. As any aficionado of fairy tales will know, the worst always loiters.

It is on the same grid as parliament and has never before been load shed

It has an advanced back-up system including 30,000 litres of stored water in the cellar, along with a well fit for a witch. It is on the same electrical grid as parliament and has never before been load shed, but the building nevertheless boasts a solar inverter system that provides four and a half hours of electricity in the event that the lights do one day go out.

But perhaps the zen stroke, is the management of light, filtered through large windows, sometimes occupying a whole wall, the sunlight is not direct. In summer in Cape Town, when the sun buzzes everywhere, blowing you away with its meanness, the apartment lies in latticed penumbra.  

It is surrounded by a city on the rise

It is surrounded by a city on the rise, where space is at a premium. Its optics, with Table Mountain and harbour views, are sensational. 

"It is designed like a Manhattan apartment with valet parking and a doorman with epaulettes." says Silke whose imagination is on high alert.

This site in the city centre has been carefully chosen for its cultural and historical context and the layers of the past that surround it. There is a storybook quality about the building, a Harry Potter intrigue, based in the past but put into action in the present in a city that is being revitalised day by day. 

Today Church Square glitters with new found sophistication marked by internationally recognised restaurants like FYN that perches in a glass box on top of what used to be Speakers' Corner, a lowish-rent eatery loved by journos. The whole building has now become a cathedral of fine dining.

Peter Tempelhoff, half Canadian, half South African, is patron chef at FYN, a real doll, easy going, hard working, realistic.

Last year FYN, made it onto the list of the World's 50 Best -- ranking at number 37 and being named Best Restaurant in Africa.

"I love this area, the history, the atmosphere of a big city. It is a town on the move and every day there are new opportunities," says Tempelhoff.

I vote Cape Town an AAA City:

A for air

A for architecture

A for attitude

Spindle hits the nerve ends with a shiver, claiming the sweet spot of the city, weaving a silken thread through the hardscrabble of the cityscape, offering enough intrigue to captivate the heart.

"But in the end" admits Silke, "it is all about the doorman."