Ralph Pucci in Mayfair: The Pop-Up That Opened an American House’s European Chapter

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 10 min

In September 2022, Ralph Pucci International took its first gallery outside America to 18 Albemarle Street, in the heart of Mayfair’s oldest run of art dealers. The story of how a family mannequin-repair business became a furniture house begins with one French designer, and it explains exactly why London was the obvious next address.

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Ralph Pucci International opened a temporary gallery at 18 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, on 21 September 2022, timed to the opening days of the London Design Festival. It ran for six weeks, through PAD London and Frieze London, before its scheduled close on 31 October 2022, with the option to extend further. At 2,000 square feet across two floors, it was the company’s first gallery anywhere outside the United States in a history stretching back to 1954.

The scale invites a straightforward read: an American luxury brand testing a fashionable postcode during a busy fair week. That is accurate as far as it goes, but it skips the more interesting fact. Ralph Pucci’s entire furniture business exists because of a French designer who never lived to see it reach London, and the pop-up on Albemarle Street was less a marketing exercise than the latest instalment of an expansion she started by asking a mannequin-maker to sell her furniture in America.

A curated gallery inside 18 Albemarle Street

The Mayfair space held a compressed version of Ralph Pucci’s American showrooms, edited down to what the gallery’s own team called a curated selection from its roster of international artists and designers. The line-up included Patrick Naggar, Eric Schmitt, Vladimir Kagan, Paul Mathieu, Stefan Bishop, Lianne Gold, Kevin Walz, John Wigmore and Claudia Alvarez, with paintings by Spencer Fung hung throughout the two floors.

Naggar used the opening to debut two new pieces internationally for the first time: the Fenice dining chair and the Paros floor lamp, shown alongside established works including the Lotus coffee table, the Curve sofa, the Artemis console, the Aphrodite floor lamp, the Seagull armchair and the Pharos cabinet.

Two other names on the wall explain how deliberately the roster was chosen. Vladimir Kagan was one of the defining figures of American mid-century furniture, a German-born designer who trained at Columbia and opened his own New York shop in 1949, the same year one of his wrought-iron chairs won the Museum of Modern Art’s Good Design Award. He died in 2016, and Ralph Pucci had continued producing his designs afterwards, which made Mayfair the first time several of those pieces had been shown in the United Kingdom at all. Eric Schmitt, by contrast, was very much a living presence: a French designer born in Toulouse in 1955 who works from a studio near the Fontainebleau forest, reworking French decorative arts traditions in bronze and cast metal with the country’s own artisans, and who has shown with Ralph Pucci since 2006. Between them, Kagan and Schmitt gave the gallery a spine running from postwar New York to present-day France, either end of the story the gallery itself was telling in London.

Ralph Pucci described the difference from the company’s American galleries directly: “This is so different from our U.S. galleries, in their big industrial spaces. But it is great to edit and introduce ourselves in an intimate space that helps clients and collectors to know us better and discover our range of both timeless and innovative design.” The two-floor townhouse format, rather than the double-height industrial sheds of the New York and Los Angeles galleries, was the point rather than a constraint.

Why Mayfair, and why September 2022

The timing put the gallery inside three overlapping calendars at once. London Design Festival ran from 17 to 25 September 2022, PAD London followed at Berkeley Square from 10 to 16 October, and Frieze London ran from 12 to 16 October, concentrating design buyers and contemporary art collectors on Albemarle Street within the same six-week window, a genuinely rare alignment of calendars for one address to sit inside.

Michael Pucci, Ralph Pucci’s son and the company’s vice president, framed the move as overdue rather than opportunistic: “We have always wanted to have a gallery in London. Many of our clients and collectors are based overseas, and London is such a global hub.” He also placed it against the company’s own calendar, calling it the first global expansion as the business approached its seventieth year.

The address itself carried its own argument. Albemarle Street has been a concentrated gallery row since well before Ralph Pucci existed, anchored by the Royal Institution at number 21 and running past Marlborough Fine Art and Connaught Brown. Placing a furniture and lighting gallery on a street built around paintings and sculpture put Pucci’s work in the same conversation as fine art rather than home furnishing, which is exactly how the company had always described its output.

From a Mount Vernon basement to a sculpture studio

None of it would exist without a much smaller start. Nick and Lee Pucci began repairing department store mannequins from the basement of their home in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1954. Their son Ralph joined the business in 1976, at the age of twenty-two, and persuaded his parents to stop repairing other manufacturers’ mannequins and start sculpting their own.

The sculpture studio opened in 1977, and it remains the part of the company that everything else grew out of. Every mannequin form was, and still is, hand-sculpted in clay or plaster before being cast, rather than produced from a stock industrial mould. That workshop attracted collaborations with artists including Kenny Scharf, Ruben Toledo and Maira Kalman, and forms modelled on Christy Turlington and Veruschka. It was a sculpture studio doing retail display work, which is an unusual position to occupy, and it is the reason a French interior designer would end up asking Ralph Pucci, rather than a furniture manufacturer, to represent her in America.

A sculpture studio, recognised as one

The claim that Pucci’s mannequins belong in the same conversation as fine art is not just a line the gallery uses about itself. In 2015, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design staged Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin, running from 31 March to 30 August that year, the first museum exhibition anywhere to treat mannequin design as a serious artistic practice in its own right. It brought together more than thirty mannequins from three decades of the studio’s work, alongside a recreation of the sculpting studio itself, and drew on collaborations with figures including Diane von Furstenberg and Kenny Scharf. The museum’s chief curator credited Pucci with turning what had been an anonymous commercial form into something more specific and more considered than fashion retail had previously allowed.

That is the credibility Ralph Pucci carried into Mayfair seven years later. A studio a design museum had already treated as worth a full retrospective was a natural fit for a street built around dealers, which is exactly the register Albemarle Street operates in.

The mannequin that built a furniture house

Andrée Putman was not a newcomer when she arrived at Pucci’s studio. Born in Paris in 1925 into a banking family, she trained as a pianist at the Paris Conservatoire and won its First Harmony Prize from the composer Francis Poulenc at nineteen, before abandoning music for a career that moved through fashion journalism at Elle and art direction at Prisunic, where her stated aim was to put good design within reach of an ordinary shopper. In 1978, at fifty-three, she founded Écart International, dedicated to reviving the Art Deco and modernist furniture of Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Jean-Michel Frank, designers whose work had fallen out of production and, in some cases, out of memory.

Her international reputation was made in 1984, when she designed the interiors of Morgans Hotel in New York, credited as the project that established the boutique hotel as a category on its own. It was on the strength of that reputation, two years later in 1986, that she designed the Olympian Goddess mannequin for Ralph Pucci, an Art Deco-inflected form produced for Barneys New York and sculpted in the same Mount Vernon workshop that had spent a decade building its own artistic credibility.

The commission became something larger. Putman asked Ralph Pucci to represent her furniture in America, and the request became the gallery’s furniture division, which opened in 1989. By 1990 Pucci was showing Putman’s pieces alongside a small founding roster: Chris Lehrecke, Patrick Naggar, Hervé Van der Straeten, India Mahdavi, Eric Schmitt and Jim Zivic. Furniture went on to overtake mannequins as the larger part of the business. Every designer shown on Albemarle Street thirty-three years later, Naggar and Schmitt included, was there because a mannequin commission from a French interior architect became a standing invitation for European designers to sell through an American gallery. Putman died in Paris in January 2013, having never seen the company reach the city where her own reputation as a boutique-hotel pioneer had first been tested against an international audience, at Morgans.

What came after Mayfair

The pop-up did what pop-ups are meant to do: it tested an idea. What happened next shows it worked as a test rather than as a single event. In December 2023, Ralph Pucci opened a permanent, 10,000 square foot gallery in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, a space that later hosted its In Transitions: Miami Film Stills exhibition, more than doubling the footprint the company had briefly occupied in Mayfair and giving it a fourth fixed address alongside New York and Los Angeles.

The European thread did not stop either. In 2025, marking the company’s seventieth year in business, Ralph Pucci presented PURE, an exhibition of hand-sculpted Plasterglass editions staged inside Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilion at Château La Coste in Provence, one of France’s best-known design and art destinations. It was a second, more considered European appearance, this time built around the sculpture studio’s own work rather than a curated group show, and it placed the company’s forms alongside a building by one of the twentieth century’s most significant architects.

London itself has not been forgotten in the meantime. As of 2026, Ralph Pucci’s own gallery listings name New York, Los Angeles and Miami with full addresses and opening hours, and list London separately as returning soon. Read against the Miami expansion and the Château La Coste exhibition, that is not a loose end. It is a company that opened its European account on Albemarle Street in 2022, kept building outward from it for three years, and has said plainly that London remains part of the plan rather than a chapter it closed.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file the Mayfair pop-up as a six-week marketing moment timed neatly to three overlapping fairs, and move on. The dates support that reading. They just do not explain it.

The explanation sits with a pianist-turned-designer who spent her career reviving furniture other people had stopped making, and who in 1986 walked into a mannequin sculptor’s workshop in Mount Vernon and recognised a level of craft worth building a business around. Andrée Putman asked Ralph Pucci to sell her furniture in America. Everything Albemarle Street showed in 2022, and everything Ralph Pucci has opened since, from Wynwood to Provence, runs back through that one request.

Seen that way, the London gallery was never really a test of Mayfair. It was a test of whether the company Putman helped build could carry her instinct for reviving overlooked design across an ocean and have it read the same way twice. Miami and Château La Coste suggest the answer was yes. London, by the company’s own account, is still to come. Ralph Pucci himself reflected on that inheritance, and on what comes next for the family business, in a recent interview with this publication.