A Regency Reverie: sketch in Bloom’s Eleventh Edition Rebuilds a Listed Mayfair Room for Jane Austen’s Anniversary Year

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 7 min

Every spring for eleven years running, sketch has stripped its Grade II*-listed Mayfair rooms back to flowers and rebuilt them as something else entirely. In 2025, the something else was Jane Austen’s England, marking the 250th anniversary year of her birth. The exhibition closed on 1 June 2025, but the pattern it belongs to is the more interesting story.

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For one month in the spring of 2025, the entrance hall at 9 Conduit Street disappeared under a tapestry of rose trails, clematis, foxgloves and forget-me-nots. Upstairs, wisteria vines made from preserved roses wound down the staircases. In the Lecture Room and Library, a single wisteria tree grew from the floor. In what sketch calls the Pods, the toilets became a theatrical set piece. None of it was permanent. All of it was gone within five weeks, packed away to make room for whatever comes next.

This was sketch in Bloom, sketch’s eleventh annual floral exhibition, running from 1 May to 1 June 2025 inside a Grade II*-listed Mayfair townhouse. Its theme was Jane Austen, timed to the 250th anniversary year of her birth. The exhibition has since closed, and by the time you read this it will be a year and more in the past. What it leaves behind is worth examining anyway, because sketch in Bloom is not really a seasonal decoration exercise. It is an annual demonstration that a protected historic interior can be completely reinvented, without a single permanent alteration, using nothing but flowers, paint and imagination. That has been true for eleven consecutive editions, and the building it happens inside has been proving the same point in slower motion for two and a half centuries.

What eleven weeks of flowers actually replaced

Four separate designers were given four separate rooms and told, in effect, to make them somebody else’s world for a month.

Lucy Vail Floristry took the entrance and The Glade, the space sketch describes as its arboreal gallery. The entrance became the tapestry of rose trails, clematis, foxgloves and forget-me-nots, a deliberately overgrown, hedgerow-thick threshold rather than a tidy floral arch. The Glade itself was hung with lace parasols dressed in blooms beneath a canopy meant to evoke Austen’s own description of sitting in the shade on a fine day, looking upon verdure, and calling it the most perfect refreshment. Vail’s studio, Lucy Vail Floristry, was founded in 2017 after she trained through a year’s apprenticeship in Florence and a further six months in Venice; her best-known public work before sketch in Bloom was the entrance archway for RHS Chelsea’s 2022 Platinum Jubilee display, a six by three metre structure planted with 3,500 British plants that RHS Chelsea has called the largest entrance in the show’s history. She was invited back to design the main public entrance again in 2023.

Meg Boscawen, a decorative artist who trained under the muralist Lizzi Porter on projects including the Mayfair members’ club 5 Hertford Street, built a meadow dreamscape and a moss sculpture depicting an Austen heroine. Boscawen’s practice is largely freehand, painted without masking tape, and normally runs to marbling, tortoiseshell finishes and Charleston-style painted doors for private clients; sketch in Bloom gave her a public stage and a literary brief rather than a domestic one.

Rob Van Helden Floral Design took the Lecture Room and Library, where a central wisteria tree, built from preserved roses rather than the real, fast-fading flower, anchored a room usually reserved for private dining. Van Helden was born and trained in Holland before establishing his London studio over more than three decades of work that has included Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara Ball and Pierce Brosnan’s wedding; his stated preference is to work with a single flower en masse, the way it grows in the wild, rather than mixing varieties into a contrived arrangement, which is closer to how a wisteria tree actually reads once built at full scale indoors.

Ricky Paul, trained originally in theatre before moving into event floristry, reworked the Pods, sketch’s set of individual toilet cubicles that have functioned as a rotating design showcase since the venue opened. Paul’s studio describes his approach as blending theatrical flair with horticultural expertise, built around corporate activations, weddings and sculptural installations rather than conventional bouquet work, which is the exact skillset a four-metre stall containing a full floral scene requires.

Elsewhere, sketch and Penguin produced limited-edition hardback editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, and the kitchen served a literary-themed afternoon tea, reported at the time at £115 per person, alongside a separate three Michelin-starred lunch menu offered at £150 per person for the duration of the exhibition. Dress designer Sonia Taouhid contributed costume pieces worn by staff through the run. None of the four rooms were left as sketch normally presents them, and none of the changes required so much as a screw in a listed wall.

A room that has never once stayed the same

That last point matters more at 9 Conduit Street than it would almost anywhere else, because the building has spent 246 years being rebuilt from the inside without ever losing its original shell.

The house was designed in 1779 by the architect James Wyatt for a private resident, James Viner, and it has carried Grade II* listed status since February 1958, the tier reserved for buildings of more than special interest. In the century and a half after Viner, the address passed through an unusually mixed cast of tenants for a single Mayfair townhouse: cycling clubs, ballooning societies and psychological societies all held rooms there at different points, and the building carries a documented connection to the suffrage movement in the early 1900s, a period when Mayfair institutional addresses of exactly this kind were quietly useful to a campaign that needed respectable premises. From 1887 to 1909, the Royal Institute of British Architects used the building as its own headquarters, which means the profession responsible for listing buildings like it once ran its business from inside one. By the mid-twentieth century the same rooms had become Christian Dior’s London atelier, redecorated in the 1970s in a grey scheme by the designer Max Clendinning that stripped the interiors back to something closer to a stage set than a couture house.

sketch opened inside the building in the early 2000s under the restaurateur Mourad Mazouz, with the original interiors, including the Pods, designed by the architect Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance. Published accounts differ on the exact year, with some citing 2002 and others 2003; this is worth confirming against sketch’s own records before republishing a firm date. What is not in dispute is that every one of these occupants, from a private townhouse to a professional institute to a couture atelier to a restaurant that stages an entirely different exhibition every spring, treated the building the same way: as a fixed historic shell that gets completely reinvented on the inside, repeatedly, without ever being structurally altered. sketch in Bloom is not a break from that pattern. It is the most literal, most frequent version of it, run annually since the mid-2010s and now eleven editions deep.

Why Jane Austen, and why the date needs a small correction

Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775, which places the 250th anniversary of her birth on 16 December 2025, roughly six and a half months after sketch in Bloom’s exhibition closed on 1 June 2025. The show is accurately described as marking Austen’s 250th anniversary year; it is not accurate to describe it as marking her 250th birthday, since it ran and closed well before the date itself. The distinction is small but worth making precisely, particularly for anyone searching for Austen’s actual bicentenary-and-a-half date rather than the season in which one Mayfair restaurant chose to mark it.

The choice of Austen nonetheless suits the format better than most literary anniversaries would. Her novels are set almost entirely in the pastoral English landscape sketch in Bloom spent a month recreating in miniature: hedgerows, meadows, parsonage gardens, the shade of a well-placed tree treated as a genuine pleasure rather than a backdrop. The quotation used in The Glade, about sitting in the shade on a fine day and looking upon verdure, comes directly from Austen’s own writing and gives the room’s canopy of lace parasols and blooms a textual anchor rather than a purely decorative one. Boscawen’s moss sculpture of an Austen heroine and the Penguin hardback tie-ins extend the same literalism: this was a set built around specific scenes and specific words, not a generic spring theme with a period costume department attached.

It also continues a run of exhibitions that have used the format to mark an institutional or cultural anniversary rather than simply celebrating the season. The 2024 edition, the tenth, marked the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary with four designers working across botanical wallpaper, an impressionist-referencing Lecture Room installation and a JMW Turner-inspired ceiling piece in The Glade. Read together, the two editions suggest sketch in Bloom now functions less as a springtime décor refresh and more as an annual commission brief, with the theme changing but the underlying exercise, transforming a listed room around someone else’s story, staying constant.

Final thoughts

sketch in Bloom’s Jane Austen edition has already closed, and nothing about it can be visited now. What it demonstrates holds regardless of the calendar: that a Grade II*-listed building with more than two centuries of institutional turnover behind it can still be treated as an active design brief rather than a fixed relic, provided nothing about the intervention is permanent. Four designers, working in flowers, paint and preserved botanical material, spent a month telling one writer’s story inside a room that has told a great many other stories before her. The building did not need to change to accommodate any of them. That has always been the point.