Here, There and Everywhere: sketch London’s Christmas of 2019

INTERIORS · LONDON

Reading time: 10 min

For Christmas 2019, sketch handed its five Mayfair rooms to seven different specialists rather than one designer with one theme: a florist who built an old London street in the Entrance and a flying saucer in the Egg-Loos, a milliner who dressed a hat shop window, an architect who threaded a lightning-branched sculpture between rooms, and a maker whose Chinoiserie tree, arranged for the Lecture Room and Library, was named among the world’s best that December. Two of that year’s Christmas designers had already worked sketch’s Mayfair Flower Show seven months earlier, which is the detail that explains how the whole thing holds together.

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sketch opened at 9 Conduit Street, Mayfair, in 2002, the work of the Algerian-French restaurateur Mourad Mazouz in partnership with the French chef Pierre Gagnaire, inside a Grade II*-listed Georgian townhouse. Its best-known room, the Gallery, has been pink since 2015, when India Mahdavi redesigned it; that room and its rotating art hang are their own story. Every December, sketch tells a different one, across the rest of the building.

For Christmas 2019, that story was called Here, There and Everywhere, and it ran from November 2019 to 5 January 2020. It spanned five spaces: the Entrance, the Glade, the Lecture Room and Library, the Parlour, and the Egg-Loos, sketch’s cult toilets. Each was given to a different maker, working in a different material and to a different brief, rather than to one designer applying a single theme across the whole building.

Carly Rogers, working as florist and creative director, built the Entrance into an old London streetscape and the Egg-Loos into a scene from another planet. The milliner Piers Atkinson dressed a hat shop window inside that street. The architect Alex Haw threaded a tree-like sculpture through the rooms it connects. Kim Beedie, creative director of Figa & Co, spiralled the Glade upward from a single teacup. Ricky Jackson, working as Ricky Paul Flowers, built a Chinoiserie tree for the Lecture Room and Library that was named one of the world’s best Christmas trees that December. Pom Pom Factory reworked a Filipino Christmas tradition into a kaleidoscope for the Parlour. Seven names, five rooms, one building, over six weeks.

The Entrance: an old London street built for one Christmas

Carly Rogers transformed sketch’s Entrance into Sketch Christmas Arcades, an old London streetscape drawn from the world of A Christmas Carol: a run of festive shopfronts and lamplit detail built to be walked through on the way into the building, rather than viewed from one spot. Rogers trained as a florist from her teens, working a Saturday job in a flower shop before taking a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, and her practice since has been built on staging flowers and installations as narrative rather than arrangement. By 2019 she was already a familiar name at sketch: seven months earlier, her studio had built one of the floral installations for the building’s Mayfair Flower Show, a connection worth returning to below.

Inside that streetscape, the milliner Piers Atkinson dressed a hat shop window with archive pieces from his own collections and designed the lapels and hats worn by sketch’s front-of-house staff through the season. Atkinson grew up around millinery, the son of a theatrical milliner at English National Opera, and served his apprenticeship in 1999 under Zandra Rhodes, who he has credited with shaping his instinct for colour. He launched his first headpiece collection in 2008, working in leatherwork, hand-blocking, gold leafing and hand-beading from his East London studio, and his pieces have since been worn by Rihanna, Lady Gaga and members of the Royal Family, and shown at the V&A. A hat shop window built from his own archive, inside a street built to look old, gave the Entrance a piece of real millinery history rather than a prop.

Connecting the Entrance to the rooms beyond it, the architect Alex Haw built Arboreal Lightning, a tree-like sculpture that ran between spaces rather than sitting inside one of them. Haw took a first-class degree at the Bartlett School of Architecture before a Fulbright-funded master’s at Princeton, then worked on Terminal 5 at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, on Paddington station at Grimshaw, and with Diller + Scofidio, before founding his own practice, Atmos Studio. The studio’s work runs on the idea that architecture should be built four-dimensionally, choreographing how people move through a space over time rather than only shaping the space itself, and a branching, illuminated structure that physically links the Entrance to the rooms further inside sketch is that idea built at Christmas scale.

The Glade: A Storm in a Tea Cup

Kim Beedie, creative director of the London studio Figa & Co, turned the Glade into A Storm in a Tea Cup: faded blooms spiralling upward from a single centralised teacup, billowing as they rise into a cloud suspended above the room. Beedie worked as an interior designer and stylist before founding Figa & Co in 2006, and that background shows in the installation’s logic: it reads less like a floral display than a piece of scenography, built around one object, at one scale, working the whole height of the room rather than dressing its surfaces. A teacup as the single source of a room-filling storm is a design idea built on proportion as much as on flowers.

The Lecture Room and Library: an 18th-century Russian court, and a third Michelin star

Inside the Lecture Room and Library, sketch’s most formal dining room, Ricky Jackson, working under his studio name Ricky Paul Flowers, built a Christmas tree titled Once Upon a Time at the Court of Catherine the Great of Russia. Its structure was a steel core wrapped in golden bark, with branches individually dressed in scented pine, autumnal leaves, blossoms and hand-dipped wax roses, gold fans and sculpted crane figures nested among them: an aristocratic Chinoiserie palette drawn from the fashion that swept the 18th-century Russian royal court under Catherine the Great, built onto a form that reads, from a distance, as an oversized bonsai tree. It was named one of the ten most original Christmas trees in the world that December by Dezeen, the only sketch installation from that Christmas to receive that kind of independent design recognition.

The room around it had its own reason to matter that year. The Lecture Room and Library was designed by Gabhan O’Keeffe when sketch opened in 2002 and has changed little since, building its Michelin reputation gradually: a first star in 2005, a second in 2012, and a third in 2019, the same year Jackson’s tree stood in it. A room that had just been confirmed among the most exacting dining rooms in the country got, that Christmas, a piece built with an equivalent level of hand-finish, gold leaf and individually dressed branches rather than a single bought tree dressed once and left alone.

The Parlour: a Filipino Christmas tradition, reworked through a kaleidoscope

In the Parlour, the studio Pom Pom Factory, founded by Karen Hsu in East London, built Christmas Parlour Kaleidoscope, a set of decorative structures based on the parol, the star-shaped lantern that is the central Christmas symbol in the Philippines, reinterpreted through the doubled, refracted geometry of a kaleidoscope. Mirror starbursts, paper gems and tassels were built around a three-metre origami bow, the whole installation designed to fracture and repeat as a viewer moved past it rather than to be read from a single angle, the way an actual kaleidoscope only resolves into pattern in motion.

The Egg-Loos: a flying saucer over Conduit Street

Sketch’s cult toilets, the Egg-Loos, got the installation’s most theatrical turn. Carly Rogers, returning for a second room, built Over the Moon for Christmas: a space-age scene staged as an alien spacecraft delivering a Christmas tree to Earth, centred on a four-metre flying saucer suspended above the space. Alongside it hung The Eclipse, a sculpture by the artist Balint Bolygo. Bolygo, born in Hungary in 1976 and working between studios in London and Margate, builds time-based kinetic sculpture: mechanical pieces that behave like instruments from an era when art and science were not yet separated, producing drawings, light projections or slowly shifting forms as they run rather than sitting still as fixed objects. A rotating, light-catching sculpture by a maker whose whole practice is built on things that change while you watch them was, in a room already staged as an alien landing, exactly the right kind of object to hang from the ceiling.

A shared roster: why sketch hands its rooms to different specialists

The pattern across all five rooms is not a shared aesthetic. A Dickensian street, a spiralling teacup, a Russian court tree, a Filipino lantern and a flying saucer do not belong to one design language. What they share is a method: sketch treats each room as its own design problem and hands it to a specialist chosen for that problem, rather than briefing one designer to lay a single theme across the whole building.

That method is easier to see with one piece of context that sits outside the Christmas coverage itself. In May 2019, seven months before Here, There and Everywhere opened, sketch had already given its rooms over to a different seasonal event: the Mayfair Flower Show, staged across six floral installations by six studios, among them Figa & Co, Carly Rogers Flowers and Ricky Paul Flowers. By December, three of those six spring florists, Kim Beedie, Carly Rogers and Ricky Jackson, were back, now dressing three of the five Christmas rooms between them. Sketch was not commissioning a fresh set of collaborators twice in one year. It was working from a bench of specialists it already trusted, moving the same names between a spring flower show and a winter Christmas, and letting each build a deeper relationship with the building room by room rather than spreading one vision across the whole thing in a single sitting.

The same instinct ran through what sketch put in the rooms beyond flowers, glass and paper. Its in-house trio for the season was styled by the Marrakech-based couturier Karim Tassi, brought in for costume rather than composition. Dance performances came from the ballerina Jenna Lee, alongside a programme of Christmas carols through the rooms. Music and movement got the same treatment as the five installations: handed to a specialist in that discipline, rather than folded into a single Christmas brief written by one creative director.

Final thoughts

Here, There and Everywhere is easy to read as five unrelated Christmas scenes under one roof: a Dickensian street, a teacup storm, a Russian court tree, a kaleidoscope lantern and a flying saucer. Looked at that way, it is still a striking installation. It is a more interesting one once the May 2019 Mayfair Flower Show is read alongside it, because the two events show sketch working the same short list of specialists twice in a single year, moving them between rooms and between seasons rather than commissioning fresh names each time a room needed dressing.

That habit has outlasted the 2019 installation itself. Six years later, for Christmas 2025’s The Art of Après, Pom Pom Factory, the studio behind 2019’s kaleidoscope Parlour, returned to sketch to hang the Gallery’s ceiling with hundreds of paper constellations, this time working in biodegradable crepe rather than mirror and paper gems. Ricky Jackson returned too, building his ninth consecutive Christmas installation for the building in 2025, an East Bar mountain landscape rather than a single tree. Neither piece needed to invoke 2019 to work in 2025, but both are the same method in a later year: a specialist given a room, and, more often than not, invited back to work another one.

That is what makes Here, There and Everywhere worth reading as a design decision rather than a seasonal backdrop. sketch did not ask for one Christmas story told in one voice. It asked seven different specialists, several of them already known to the building from earlier that same year, to answer the same brief in seven different ways, and let five very different rooms carry seven very different answers at once.