The Apartment at Embassy Towers

Landmarks

Sandhurst is one of Johannesburg’s most exclusive suburbs, and the middle of Sandton is a short walk away.

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  Sandton City Mall

  Five minutes on foot.

  It opened in September 1973 and is still one of the largest shopping centres in Africa — around 128,000 m² of shops on several levels, more than 300 of them, plus cinemas and a food court. The Diamond Walk arcade at one end carries the luxury houses (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada); the rest is ordinary useful retail, which is the part that matters when you have run out of milk.

• 

  Nelson Mandela Square

  The same five-minute walk, next door and joined to it by a bridge.

  An open Italianate piazza that opened in 1994 as Sandton Square and was renamed ten years later, in March 2004, when the six-metre bronze of Nelson Mandela was unveiled on its steps — the first public statue of him in South Africa, sculpted by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane. This is the eating-out half of the complex: restaurant tables out on the square, and between the two of them well over 400 shops.

• 

  Sandton Gautrain Station

  A ten-minute walk from Embassy Towers.

  It opened on 8 June 2010, in the first stretch of the Gautrain to run, and sits about 45 m below the corner of Rivonia and West Streets — deep enough that the lifts and escalators down are part of the trip. Two lines cross here, and it is the Sandton end of the airport service, so trains run across Johannesburg and Pretoria from one platform and direct to OR Tambo International from another.