The Art of Après: Inside sketch London’s Five-Room Christmas Transformation

INTERIORS · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

Five studios, five rooms, one Mayfair townhouse. sketch London’s Christmas 2025 installation, The Art of Après, sends a florist trained in Florence into the Glade, a set-builder from Essex into the East Bar, and a paper artist working only in biodegradable crepe into the Gallery, where the Christmas display is not the room’s real news. It is the last thing hanging there before the room changes again.

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Introduction

sketch, the Mayfair restaurant and gallery group at 9 Conduit Street, has turned its public rooms into an alpine scene for Christmas 2025. The installation is called The Art of Après, it runs from 14 November 2025 to 5 January 2026, and it is curated by Milly Wright, sketch’s Creative Director and Art Curator, across four of the building’s five public rooms: Reception and the Glade, the East Bar and Pods, the Lecture Room and Library, and the Gallery.

Each room has been given to a different maker. Lucy Vail Floristry builds the entrance and the Glade from real pine and dried botanicals. Ricky Paul, working under the name of his own studio, constructs a kinetic mountain landscape beneath the dome of the East Bar. Mehbs Yacqub makes a crystal tree for the Lecture Room and Library, decorated by the artist Maya Heritage. PomPom Factory hangs the Gallery’s ceiling with hundreds of paper constellations, cut entirely from biodegradable crepe.

None of these four rooms is being decorated from a blank slate. Each has its own design history at sketch, some of it older than the studios now working inside it, and that history is the reason Après reads differently from room to room. The mountain in the East Bar sits inside the one interior at sketch that has barely changed since 2002. The paper snow in the Gallery hangs for exactly eight weeks inside a room that changes its permanent art every few years, and this year it happens to close its Christmas run eight days before that room’s next chapter opens. That is the argument this piece makes: Après is not a single seasonal theme laid over five identical spaces. It is four different answers to what a room can carry, worked out against four different design histories.

Reception and the Glade: a florist trained in Florence and Venice

The entrance sequence into sketch, and the Glade beyond it, has been built by Lucy Vail Floristry into a tactile alpine forest: real pine, hand-painted scenic trees and dried botanicals in a tonal range from dusty white to glacial green, deliberately avoiding artificial snow. A repurposed ski chairlift sits against a backdrop of hand-painted mountains at the entrance, turning the arrival into a small tableau rather than a signpost. Inside the Glade, the room’s existing tree canopy is worked over with dried flowers and glass icicles, which catch the room’s ambient light and read, from a distance, as falling snow.

Lucy Vail founded her studio in 2017, after training for a year in Florence and six months in Venice with an established florist. Her practice since has moved toward large-scale public commissions rather than events alone: she designed the Bull Ring Gate entrance at RHS Chelsea in 2022, a six by three metre archway marking the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and filled with 3,500 British-grown plants, and returned in 2023 to design the show’s London Gate, its main public entrance. That is the background the Glade installation is built on: a florist whose recent work has been judged on how well it holds up as public architecture, not just as decoration, now applying the same eye to a room sketch has been reworking in some form since 2002.

The East Bar and Pods: the room that has not changed, transformed the most

For his ninth Christmas working with sketch, Ricky Paul has built the installation’s most technically ambitious piece: a central mountain landscape filling the space beneath the East Bar’s dome, with moving miniature ski lifts, hand-detailed cable cars, illuminated timber lodges with weathering worked into their surfaces for authenticity, pine-dotted slopes, a snowplough scene, hand-placed miniature skiers, and, tucked into the scene, a hidden yeti. Real pine trees cascade down the staircase. The materials are kept legible on purpose: timber, glass, metal, greenery, so the scale trick between the oversized mountain and its miniature figures reads clearly rather than dissolving into spectacle.

Ricky Paul is the trading name of Ricky Jackson, who studied performing arts and set design before working in interiors at Heals and Harrods, then moved into floristry with a Notting Hill studio serving fashion, media and PR clients. He founded his own studio, based in Loughton, Essex, in 2010. His history with sketch predates the East Bar commission: in 2019, his team built an eight-metre Bonsai-style Christmas tree for the Lecture Room and Library, gold-sculpted birds and waxed roses among its branches, which was named one of the world’s ten best Christmas trees that year by Dezeen. Six years and one room later, that same practice is now building an entire kinetic landscape rather than a single object, and it is doing so inside the East Bar and Pods, the one space at sketch whose architecture has barely moved since Mourad Mazouz and the designer Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance built it in 2002, complete with the inflatable furniture by Hans-Walter Müller that still furnishes the room today. It is the room at sketch with the least changed design underneath it, and every December it is the one built up, then dismantled, most elaborately on top.

The Lecture Room and Library: a crystal tree inside three Michelin stars

Mehbs Yacqub, returning for 2025, has made a crystal tree for the Lecture Room and Library, decorated by the artist Maya Heritage. Mirrored facets and cut-glass ornaments are arranged to catch and scatter the room’s own lighting, designed to mimic the way ice reflects under a night sky rather than to read as a conventional bauble tree. The effect shifts through the day as the room’s light changes, which keeps the piece closer to a sculptural installation than a fixed decoration.

The room it sits in carries its own weight. The Lecture Room and Library was designed by Gabhan O’Keeffe in 2002 and has changed little since; it took its first Michelin star in 2005, its second in 2012 and its third in 2019, and it has held all three since. A tree built to reflect and scatter light, rather than simply hang ornaments, is a reasonable thing to put in a room whose reputation already rests on precision rather than volume.

The Gallery: paper snow, and a room mid-conversation

The Gallery’s transformation is the installation’s quietest and, in one respect, its most exposed to timing. PomPom Factory, the East London studio founded by Karen Hsu in 2010, has suspended hundreds of handcrafted constellations and snow-like forms from the ceiling, made entirely from biodegradable, recycled crepe paper, layered so that shifting air in the room creates depth and shadow rather than a flat hang.

What that paper snow is suspended above is worth stating plainly, because it is not mentioned anywhere in coverage of Après itself. Through the whole run of the Christmas installation, the Gallery’s walls still carried Yinka Shonibare CBE RA’s Modern Magic, the set of textile works hung there since 2022 on India Mahdavi’s copper and Mandarine au Lait scheme. Après closes on 5 January 2026. Eight days later, on 13 January 2026, that room’s art changes again, when Jonathan Baldock’s installation The Gathering replaces Shonibare’s textiles with eighty-four ceramic masks, flower sculptures and suspended wool cocoons. PomPom Factory’s paper constellations are, in other words, the last seasonal layer to hang inside a room that was already between two permanent chapters when Christmas arrived, closing out one hang before the next artist’s work went up. Nobody dressing the Gallery for Christmas 2025 was working on a blank canvas; they were working inside the final fortnight of somebody else’s.

Craft over spectacle, room by room

What holds the four rooms together is not a shared aesthetic so much as a shared method. Each studio has been asked to work in materials that behave honestly under light and touch: real pine rather than artificial trees, hand-spun glass rather than moulded plastic, biodegradable crepe rather than synthetic paper stock. Milly Wright has described the aim as an invitation into a “joyful sketch universe,” built from creativity, warmth and togetherness rather than a single fixed theme repeated across every surface. Mourad Mazouz, sketch’s founder, has framed the installation’s purpose in similar terms: “We wanted to recreate that moment when time slows down, when the cold meets warmth. Après is not just an exhibition. It is a feeling, one we hope stays with our guests long after they have left Conduit Street.”

That distinction between decoration and design runs through every room here. A ski chairlift at the entrance, a kinetic mountain under a dome, a crystal tree built to scatter light rather than catch it, and paper snow suspended above a textile hang in its final fortnight are not variations on the same festive template. They are four separate design problems, each solved with a method suited to the specific room it sits in, which is a more demanding brief than most Christmas installations set for themselves.

How to experience Après

Après is open to anyone visiting sketch’s public rooms during opening hours, without a reservation required to see the Reception, Glade and Gallery installations. The Lecture Room and Library, holding three Michelin stars, and the East Bar require a booking to dine or drink among the installations themselves. sketch is also running a Christmas afternoon tea through the season, alongside seasonal cocktails and weekend “Folie Saturdays” programming built around the après-ski theme. The building sits at 9 Conduit Street, Mayfair, a short walk from Bond Street and Oxford Circus.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this story is that a Mayfair restaurant has gone all in on Christmas again, with real pine, hand-blown glass and a florist’s chairlift standing in for the usual tinsel. That much is true, and it would be enough to justify a visit on its own. It is also the least interesting part of what is actually happening across these four rooms.

Après is not one installation. It is four studios solving four different problems set by four rooms with four different histories: a florist building public-scale work for a room that has been reworked in some form since 2002, a set-builder scaling up from a single tree to an entire kinetic landscape inside the one interior at sketch that architecture has left alone, a crystal-maker designing for a dining room whose third Michelin star depends on exactly this kind of precision, and a paper artist hanging biodegradable snow above a textile hang that has eight days left to run. None of that is visible from a single photograph of any one room, which is precisely why it is worth setting out room by room rather than as a single seasonal theme.

sketch’s Christmas installations do not exist in isolation from the building’s design programme. They exist inside it, timed against it, and occasionally, as in the Gallery this year, running out the clock on it. That is what makes Après worth more than a festive backdrop for a photograph. It is a working demonstration of how differently a room can be asked to change, depending on what has already been asked of it.