Retail & Brand Spaces · London
Reading time: 6 minOn 25 June, RH pulled back the curtain on its most ambitious project to date: five levels of architecture, design, food and wine set inside a trio of historic Mayfair mansions, quietly reunited for the first time in their long lives. It is not, whatever first impressions might suggest, a shop.
There is a particular kind of ambition that announces itself not with noise but with stone. RH London, The Gallery in Mayfair, is that sort of gesture. Occupying the ground between the fashion houses of New Bond Street and the bespoke tailors of Savile Row, arguably the most rarefied few hundred metres in the city, it arrives with the confidence of a building that knows exactly where it sits and why.
The address alone tells a three-century story. The landmark was designed by Giacomo Leoni, the Venetian-born architect who did more than almost anyone to import Palladianism to England, and it survives as one of the few Palladian mansions of eighteenth-century London still standing. Built in 1723 as Queensberry House, it was later expanded for the 1st Marquess of Anglesey, took on a second life as Uxbridge House, and eventually became home to the Bank of England, one of the world’s oldest central banks. For the first time, these three pedigreed properties have been drawn together into a single gallery by RH chairman and chief executive Gary Friedman and the British architectural firm Foster + Partners, the studio also behind Miami’s 619 Brickell and Dubai’s Regent Residences. The result is, by the brand’s own reckoning, the most immersive retail and hospitality concept in its history.
That word, retail, is worth pausing on because RH is at pains to complicate it. The company, once known as Restoration Hardware, has spent the past decade dismantling the idea of the furniture showroom and rebuilding it as something closer to a members’ club crossed with a museum. RH London is the fullest expression yet of that thesis. “While RH London may not sound like a retail store,” the brand notes, “it’s not meant to be.” In a city where, as the company rather grandly puts it, “the measure is legacy,” the intention is clearly to be judged on cultural terms rather than commercial ones.
A library before a lobby
The sequencing is telling. Step through the limestone portico, and you are met not by sofas but by an Architecture & Design Library, a room devoted to rare volumes by the foundational Italian masters: Vitruvius, da Vinci, Palladio, alongside the British lineage of Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Its centrepiece is a first Italian edition, circa 1521, of De Architectura, The Ten Books on Architecture, written by the first-century BC architect Marcus Vitruvius, whose description of a man outstretched within a circle and a square would, some fifteen centuries later, inspire Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. To open a design gallery with a library rather than a lookbook is a statement of priorities, and a canny one: it frames everything that follows as scholarship rather than salesmanship.
From here, the building unfolds vertically across five levels, threaded together by a scenic glass lift conceived with Foster + Partners; a magnificent curved structure framed in champagne gold that turns the simple act of ascending into something theatrical. Flanking it, a Tea Salon and Wine Bar clad in Bronze Amani Spanish marble pour classic teas and Champagnes with equal ceremony.
The banking hall, reimagined
If there is a single space designed to take the breath, it is The Dining Room at RH London, set within the historic banking hall itself; reclaimed, restored and reimagined beneath a luminous gold-leaf ceiling. Drawing on the tradition of London’s private members’ clubs, the room is enveloped in high-gloss panelled oak; tiered chandeliers of hand-blown Venetian glass cascade from mirrored skylights, and champagne-lacquered Roman columns rise some eight metres overhead. The menu, caviar specialities, signature salads, seafood towers, American and British classics, is almost beside the point next to the theatre of the setting, though one suspects RH would want it judged on both.
The architecture continues to reward the climb. Leoni’s original grand stair, a marvel of ornate ironwork and cantilevered limestone, spirals upward beneath a gold-leaf dome hand-gilded by master artisans and rising nearly thirteen metres overhead. It is the kind of detail that resists photography and demands to be stood beneath.
Estates, and a British sensibility
Commercially, the opening marks the United Kingdom debut of RH Estates, the brand’s most elevated collection, which amplifies the work of some of the world’s most legendary ateliers: the tailored upholstery of Dmitriy & Co, the classical grandeur of Dennis & Leen, the meticulous reproductions of Formations and the iconic designs of Michael Taylor. It is classic design filtered through a contemporary lens, and it sits alongside RH Interior Design, now among the largest residential design firms in the world, with projects on every major continent.
What lends RH London its particular character, though, is how thoroughly it has been shaped by British hands. Beyond Foster + Partners, the most seductive spaces belong to Anouska Hempel, the godmother of the boutique hotel, whose Blakes Hotel is widely credited as the world’s first. Her long-admired work found a natural champion in Friedman, and, by RH’s account, a mutual admiration has evolved into friendship and a studied collaboration. Her fingerprints are unmistakable at The Perch, reached by stepping off the scenic lift into a dark, seductive jewel box of blackened églomisé, an intimate bar beneath a smoked-glass canopy. It opens, thrillingly, onto a rooftop garden: a canopy of pleated Tucci umbrellas, towering arched mirrors and channels of sparkling water arranged into a fantasy of splendour, set high above Savile Row. Diners sit beneath grand glass birdcages, a flourish that could tip into excess in less assured hands and somehow doesn’t.
Hempel’s sensibility carries into The World of RH Bar & Lounge, a physical and digital immersion into the brand defined by bespoke Italian Merino wool velvet seating and a magnificent bronze sunburst ceiling, illuminated by floating brass pendants. At its centre, a 360-degree holographic display cycles through the places and spaces that define RH; the one moment where the gallery’s commercial engine shows itself plainly, though even that is choreographed as spectacle.
An opening, and an argument
The unveiling itself, on the evening of Thursday 25 June, gathered the kind of guest list that signals cultural intent as much as social reach. Friedman was joined by a host committee and attendees drawn from film, fashion, design and music, among them Margot Robbie, Theo James, Henry Cavill, Guy Ritchie, Janet Jackson, Naomi Campbell, Hayley Atwell, Poppy Delevingne and Daniel Lee, alongside design-world figures including Tom Dixon CBE, Amanda Levete CBE, India Hicks and Yinka Ilori. Guests moved between sushi by Endo Kazutoshi, caviar by Petrossian and Ruinart Champagne, with cocktails from a roll call of legends — Vesper Martinis courtesy of Dukes and Negroni Sbagliatos by Milan’s Bar Basso — all set to a performance by Carlita.
It was, by any measure, a considerable night. But the more interesting question is what RH London represents beyond the guest list. Here is an American brand staking an enormous claim on London’s most storied design quarter, restoring three significant buildings in the process, and betting that experience — libraries, dining rooms, rooftop gardens, gilded domes — is the future of how we buy and think about our homes. Whether one reads it as generosity or as the most sophisticated form of salesmanship yet devised, RH London is difficult to dismiss. In a city that does indeed measure in legacy, it has arrived, speaking the local language fluently.
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