40 Duke: Selfridges has built a club with two front doors

INTERIORS · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

40 Duke can be entered from the street or from the third floor of Selfridges without going outside. That is two arrivals with nothing in common, and it is the reason Nice Projects furnished 25,000 square feet as a collector’s home rather than as a scheme. A collection is the one thing that can belong to a shop and to a house at the same time.

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Most private clubs have one door, and the door is the point. You are inside or you are not.

40 Duke has two. One opens off Duke Street, so a member can arrive, be received and spend an afternoon without ever setting foot in a shop. The other is a dedicated access point on the third floor of Selfridges, so a member already in the store can step across into the club without going outside.

Those are two entirely different arrivals, and they set a design problem that most club interiors never face. For the person coming up from the street, the space has to stand on its own as a destination. For the person crossing over on the third floor, it has to feel like a continuation of the building they are already in. Read as a shop it fails one test. Read as a club it fails the other.

Nice Projects, the London studio founded in 2020 by Sacha Leong and Simone McEwan, answered with a description rather than a style. Leong, the studio’s co-founder and creative director, has said the concept was to create a collector’s home, a space to inspire and celebrate beautiful things.

It is worth taking that phrase literally, because a collector’s home is not a look. It is a way of acquiring things, and you can read it in the specification.

Twenty-five thousand square feet, and what is in it

The scale is the first surprise, because the club reads as intimate and is not small.

40 Duke runs to 25,000 square feet across multiple floors of the Selfridges flagship. Set against a members’ club in a converted house, that is a large building. Set against a department store, it is a rounding error, which is roughly the position the club occupies in every sense.

What fills it splits cleanly in two.

The private half. Twenty-four studios and suites used for personal shopping appointments, private client hosting, made-to-measure and bespoke beauty treatments, plus The Beauty Studios, The Showcase for jewellery, watches and trunk shows, and The Gallery for brand activations.

The social half. The Club Lounge, a bar seating 64. The Club Room, a private dining room seating 14. The Terrace, an outdoor café and restaurant seating 58.

Add the social seats together and you get 136, which is a modest number for 25,000 square feet. The private rooms outnumber the social ones, and that ratio tells you what the building is for. This is a place organised around appointments, with the bar and the terrace holding people either side of them.

A collector’s home is a way of buying, not a way of looking

Here is where the concept stops being a phrase and starts being verifiable.

A scheme has a single source. One studio, one supplier, one moment, one look, and the coherence comes from everything having been chosen at the same time by the same hand for the same room. A collection works the opposite way. It accumulates. Things arrive from different places over different years and cohere only because one person kept saying yes to them.

The furniture at 40 Duke is a collection.

Tacchini and Arflex are Italian, and Arflex has been in production since the Fifties. Marta Sala Éditions is Milanese and contemporary. Kallemo and Massproductions are Swedish and about as far apart in temperament as two Swedish brands can be. Piet Hein Eek is Dutch and built a career on scrap timber. Frama is Danish. Louise Roe is Danish. Paul Coenen is Dutch and works in single sheets of metal. Philippe Malouin is Canadian, London-based, and moves between industrial editions and one-off gallery pieces.

That is ten named names from at least five countries, spanning several decades and several quite different attitudes to furniture. No single showroom sells that list. Somebody assembled it piece by piece, which is precisely what a collector does, and it is why the rooms read as accumulated rather than delivered.

It also solves the two-door problem. A collection is the one kind of interior that can plausibly belong to a shop and to a private house at the same time, because a shop sells things and a collector keeps them, and both are organised around objects worth looking at.

The materials would never share a spec sheet

The same logic runs through the finishes, and it is more obvious there.

The palette takes in burl wood veneers, yellow onyx, lacquered finishes, terrazzo, travertine, cork, brushed stainless steel, and wool carpets with painterly rugs.

Read that list as a specification and it looks impossible. Burl veneer is the most decorative timber cut there is, all figure and no grain direction, the surface of Art Deco cabinetry and pre-war car dashboards. Yellow onyx is translucent, expensive and unmistakably luxurious. Terrazzo and travertine are civic materials, the floor of a bank or a bathhouse. Brushed stainless is workshop equipment. Lacquer is the most refined finish available and the least forgiving.

And then there is cork. Cork is warm, cheap, soft, quiet and slightly domestic, the surface of a noticeboard or a floor in a Sixties house. Nothing on that list belongs next to it.

Which is the point. Put cork against yellow onyx and you have declared that this room was not specified from a single mood board. The juxtaposition is the collector’s signature: an ordinary thing kept next to a rare one because both were liked. It also does real acoustic work, which is why the club can hold a 64-seat bar without the noise becoming the dominant material.

Two studios stand behind this, and neither of them is a retail studio

The most useful fact about 40 Duke is where its designers trained, and it explains why the brief was solvable.

Nice Projects was founded in 2020. Sacha Leong was born in Singapore and spent five years at Studio Ilse, having previously worked at Universal Design Studio. Simone McEwan was born in Australia and also spent five years at Studio Ilse, having come from Soho House. The studio now works across London, Singapore and Japan.

Those two lineages are exactly the two this project required.

Studio Ilse is the practice of Ilse Crawford, whose entire method is to design interiors from human comfort outwards, starting from how a room makes a person feel and working back to the plan. That is the discipline that produces a club you want to stay in.

Soho House invented the modern members’ club as a commercial format, and with it the operational knowledge of how such places actually run: how many seats, how the private rooms feed the bar, what members do between appointments.

Selfridges commissioned its club from two people who between them had spent years learning feeling at one and format at the other. The result is a room that behaves correctly as well as looking right, and that combination is rarer than it should be.

Leong has described the wider ambition plainly, and it doubles as a description of this project: the studio wants spaces with a strong personality, ones where nobody says they have seen it before.

You cannot apply to join

The membership model is worth understanding, because it changes what the interior has to do.

There is no subscription and no application form. Access to 40 Duke comes through Selfridges Unlocked, the store’s own membership programme, and it is tiered. VVSP, Very Very Selfridges Person, carries full access. VSP brings access through personal shopping appointments and dining reservations. Unlocked members at levels one to three reach it through personal shopping and beauty appointments.

André Maeder, chief executive of Selfridges Group, has described the ambition as creating a first of its kind destination for the store’s customers.

Design follows from that structure more directly than it might appear. A club you subscribe to has to feel separate from ordinary life, which is why so many of them are built to feel like somebody else’s house. A club you reach through a shop has to feel like the best room in a building you already know. It cannot disown the store, because the store is how you got there and why you qualified.

Which returns to the two doors, and to why a collector’s home was the right answer. It is warm enough to be a destination in its own right for the arrival from Duke Street, and object-led enough to feel continuous with a great shop for the arrival from the third floor. One idea, doing two jobs.

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Final thoughts

The phrase a collector’s home gets used loosely, usually to mean a room with some interesting objects in it. At 40 Duke it turns out to be an accurate account of method.

Ten makers from five countries. A material list running from yellow onyx to cork. Furniture from brands that have been in production since the Fifties sitting beside pieces by designers who work one at a time. None of that arrives in a single delivery, and none of it comes off one page.

What holds it together is not a look but a person implied by the choices, which is exactly the trick a real collection performs. You walk in and sense that somebody with a strong eye has been adding to this room for years, even though the club is new.

That is the answer to the two doors. From Duke Street it reads as somebody’s house. From the third floor it reads as the part of Selfridges where the best things ended up. Both readings are correct, and the design never has to choose between them.