Kevin Ritchie
J onathan Liebmann has a dream. A place where everyone can live together; rich and poor, professional and unskilled, believer and non-believer, black and white in a community that is crime-free and works, precisely because it is the opposite of the gated communities of Joburg’s north, because it is open.
It’s a utopian vision. What makes it stand out is that Liebmann is creating exactly this in one of the more derelict and less salubrious parts of Joburg’s inner city, where the stench of fresh urine in doorwells overwhelms the exhaust fumes of the urban commuters.
What makes it doubly different is that Liebmann will turn a profit out of it too, because in his book, making money and making a difference go hand in hand.
The 28-year-old entrepreneur is not your usual property developer. He’s not the normal dreamer either.
Instead he’s a comfortable mix of the two; MBA phrases tripping off his tongue as easily as sociological concepts like gentrification and urban renewal.
Dressed down in jeans, takkies and a hoodie, he’s walking up the stairs past the rubble of the next phase in creating his Maboneng Precinct that starts in the lee of the great Joe Slovo concrete overpass with Arts on Main and extends for almost three blocks with the next developments; Main Street Life, Revolution House, the Artisans’ Residence and Moad, which will showcase African design.
Arts on Main has already made a name for itself. During the week it’s home to William Kentridge, the Goethe Institute, Bailey’s African History Archives and The Goodman Gallery, designers Black Coffee, marketing companies and the Canteen, a trendy eatery. At the weekend, the undercover parking area and grassed commonage are transformed into a Sunday market, selling natural produce, design and dangerous bloody Marys.
It’s all part and parcel of his dream not just to rejuvenate the area, but to create functional and sustainable communities drawing people back into the inner city who once fled it – the middle class professionals themselves.
The extension of Arts on Main was Main Street Life, with its eponymous Bioscope and POPArt on the ground floor next to two restaurants, below five floors of 33m2 studio apartments sold to rent or to occupy at prices that began at R320 000. The building’s penultimate floor is the self catering 12 Decades Art Hotel on the seventh floor, boasting 12 rooms each designed by a different artist, as well as two penthouses, one of which was Liebmann’s until he sold it last month for R1.25 million. On the roof is a bar, that rugby fans are starting to stop over at en route to Ellis Park, and a boxing gym staffed by a Hillbrow boxing champion who brings some of his more promising kids across once or twice a week to give residents who want it, a proper boxing workout.
Liebmann has just returned from a 10-day trip to Berlin with his friend, Enrico Daffonchio, who also happens to be his architect. Now that he’s officially a nomad, Liebmann has moved back into the hotel for the meanwhile, into his favourite room, Perpetual Liberty 1996-2006.
“People were always pessimistic about the period, but I always thought it was one of our most expressive times, giving people the freedom to be themselves without fear for the first time ever. This is my favourite room, Enrico’s obsessed about the erotic crossing over into functionalism and back into art, which you can see here,” he says, as he opens the door into a room that is quite unlike anything in the building.
The only similarity to Ponte Obscura, the furthermost room on the left of the building, with its camera obscura projection of the Ponte Tower projected onto a screen dividing the bed from the lounge with its Nollywood sculpture, is the mini kitchen along the left wall. The centre of the Liberty room is taken up by a massive shower that can easily fit several people at once. Beyond it, mounted on a dais the breadth of the room, is a bed with white bed linen that could accommodate as many occupants of the shower and probably more for good measure.
“I’ve been thinking of redoing this room,” Liebmann remarks to his staff, “I think we should stock this room with sex toys, you know it’s perfectly natural in Berlin. They put them wrapped in plastic in all the hotel rooms, there’s no shame.”
It’s not immediately apparent if he’s joking or not.
Between Arts on Main and Main Street Life lies Revolution House. It’s an old juice factory that’s being converted into shops on the ground floor, film and sound studios and then apartments, this time 60sq m, above. The roof will be converted into a garden like Main Street Life and both will have their own wetland pools, designed by Taryn Jacobsen, the precinct’s resident landscaper, who lives at Main Street Life and works out of Revolution House while it is under construction. They’ll be unlike conventional swimming pools without a drop of chemicals, being totally cleaned by plants in the water.
Revolution House is still in the process of being renovated, but this has not stopped Propertuity, Liebmann’s company, from continuing with the mixed use concept that they pioneered at Arts on Main. There’s already been a graffiti convention drawing international artists and 200 kids from the neighbourhood whose work adorns the bare walls, while downstairs there are half pipes for the 500 skateboarders who pulled in to have some fun before the ground floor is turned into shops and let.
Two blocks across the road is the Main Change, Liebmann’s office space for the precinct, chief among which is Open, an open floor where young professionals will rent desk space and then have all the resources and facilities of a bigger company, such as boardrooms, secretarial staff, IT support as well as the creative access of working together.
On the floor above will be the Inner City spa called Cocoon.
As Liebmann’s communications manager Hayleigh Evans says: “Jonathan thinks all entrepreneurs are like overgrown kids with ADHD, all needing time out for head massages or a bit of contemplation.”
The area will have mediation booths, massage areas and space for yoga, all run by Woodlands, who run a spa in Mudersdrift.
Liebmann’s own offices are in The Main Change, old coal braziers radiating heat in offices clad in unvarnished pine with blackboards on the wall for strategy sessions and brainstorming. The boardroom, deal tables and chairs stand under a massive slogan “F**k Normality” in foot-high letters on the wall.
It’s industrial chic and urban edgy, perhaps even pretentious, but it articulates the unspoken drive and vision that will be needed to transform the as yet derelict Revolution House in less than five months from now. As it is, more than half of the apartments have already been bought, a record even for Liebmann whose apartments in Main Street Life were 98 percent taken up in less than a year.
He puts his money where his mouth is, working and living in the precinct, even if he has just sold his own house there. It’s always been that way, even the apparent haphazard growth of the precinct. Liebmann says it’s all organic development, spawned by circumstance, as much as by an overarching vision – much like his own life.
Born in Joburg to a mother who is a fashion and interior designer and a father who was a well known lawyer turned banker and artist, Liebmann moved to Durban, living in Umhlanga until his family returned to Joburg when he was 15 – coincidentally the first time he did a deal.
Moving from Carmel College in Durban to Crawford Sandton, Liebmann studied business at Monash after matric, but was always wheeling and dealing, running a chain of Laundromats at one stage, while dabbling in property. His first big coup came at the age of 20 when he bought part of a factory at the back of 44 Stanley, today a thriving artists’ colony cum office park below Auckland Park, and successfully converted it into living space.
He’s moved 11 times, from Umhlanga to Houghton, Melville, Illovo, Braamfontein, Braamfontein Werf, Lanseria, where he still owns a farm, and now City and Suburban, the forgotten corner of the Joburg inner city, due south of Ellis Park and within spitting distance of the M2 that borders the CBD.
In between, he’s been married and divorced. He’s mentions it wryly, but he’s unapologetic.
“To a large extent a lot of things follow what I’m doing in my life.”
Maboneng Phase Three follows the divorce and is the vision of an enlightened community, of a wealthy community coming back into the urban wasteland by choice – because of the opportunities it offers amid the excitement of living in a city like Joburg.
“We talk long and hard about the gentrification of the area and its impact, but there was no impact, no one was uprooted because there was no one living here,” he explains.
It was this emptiness that struck him as he drove through the area for the first time, now he hopes that by the time the precinct is finished, the pavement cafes and performing artists – who will all live there – will create a buzz that will rival Parkhurst’s cafe society on 4th Avenue.
“We’re not property developers, we’re community developers, our name says it all, we develop property for perpetuity, we’re in it for the long run.”
Evans is a good example. Like Jacobsen, she’s as much a believer as she is an employee.
She’s an actress who wanted to start a theatre in the precinct, but ended up becoming Liebmann’s PA and then the company’s communications manager. Now she’s bought an apartment in the still-to-be-completed Revolution House, but she hopes to extend her existing theatre and performing arts centre, if she can persuade Liebmann to buy the old Victorian Portuguese restaurant on Commissioner Street.
Ultimately, she hopes the entire precinct can be used as a film lot for film-makers wanting authentic urban backgrounds.
Liebmann’s other initiatives include the Artisans’ Residence, a low-cost housing project on the edge of the precinct for semi-skilled workers who will live there, but work in the precinct, closing the last link in the integrated plan.
“The spectrum we’re trying to attract is from semi-skilled to students all the way through to professionals like lawyers and bankers. It must be the best crime prevention strategy ever because everyone can live happily in the same space, there are no gated communities here, everyone is dependant on one another.”
But, as Liebmann looks west to Jewel City three blocks away, whose owners have now committed R40m to upgrading the blocks surrounding them, he is scathing about the City of Joburg’s efforts to transform the city.
“I don’t think they’re paying suitable attention to the inner city. The Joburg Development Agency is doing something but it’s on the cusp of proper transformation.
This area could be transformed within a year.”
The deadline for Liebmann’s own precinct is exactly that.