The first Rand Club was modest: a single-storey building with a bar, a billiards room, and a few offices. It was outgrown almost immediately. A grander double-storey Victorian replacement followed, with colonnaded verandas and Corinthian pillars, briefly the finest building in Johannesburg, and by 1902 that too was deemed inadequate. The current, third clubhouse was designed by the architects Leck and Emley, its construction completed in 1904. Six storeys of rusticated stone and Doric columns, it was built to project permanence in a city that had existed for less than two decades. Two half-moon wooden benches still flank the front doors, placed there because members had already made a tradition of sitting out front to watch the street go by. The founding subscribers had each chipped in for the land, taking two plots as a contribution and buying two more so the building would never feel cramped, an instinct for grandeur that the three successive clubhouses only confirmed.

The club's membership read like a roll call of the men who made the Witwatersrand the largest goldfield in the world. Mining magnates such as Hermann Eckstein and Lionel Phillips turned reef into riches, and turned some of that money toward the city, sponsoring the Johannesburg Art Gallery and stocking it with important works. Power gathered here. In the club's Main Bar in 1895, Rhodes's associate Leander Starr Jameson and his fellow conspirators from the Transvaal Reform Committee planned the raid that bears Jameson's name, an armed attempt to topple Paul Kruger's Transvaal government. It failed spectacularly, and in January 1896 many leading members were arrested for high treason. The club's history is inseparable from the politics of gold.

Step inside and the scale announces itself. The Rand Club holds the longest bar in Africa, a single unbroken run of 103 feet, roughly 31 metres. Around it the building unfolds like a vanished world made solid: a private theatre, a ballroom, an armoury, a double-volume staircase lit by a mosaic dome, and the Buckland Library, home to more than 10,000 volumes and counted among the notable private collections on the continent. The club has twice served as an official residence for visiting British royalty, in the 1920s and 1930s. A fire in June 2005 gutted the top two floors and destroyed the club's prized Pietro Annigoni portrait of Queen Elizabeth II; restoration of those upper storeys has continued for years.

For most of its life the Rand Club admitted only white men, an exclusivity that mirrored the apartheid order outside its doors. In 2016 it reinvented itself, opening membership regardless of race or gender, and a younger generation set about overhauling an institution long defined by who it kept out. The club's decline has tracked the decline of central Johannesburg itself, the gold capital that grew up around it. Membership that once topped 3,000 had fallen to around 450 by 2025. Yet the building endures, its long bar still polished, its libraries intact, a survivor from the boom that built a city on the world's richest reef.