Three archives, one building: inside Soho House Manchester

INTERIORS · MANCHESTER

Reading time: 8 min

The first Soho House in the North opened in November 2025, in the building where Coronation Street was made. Three separate archives were opened to fill it: an architectural one, a textile one and a regional one. The most interesting fact about the building is one nobody has mentioned, which is who designed it.

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Soho House Manchester opened in November 2025 at 4 Atherton Street, in the former Granada Television complex in St John’s. The entrance is marked by a brass plaque and nothing else.

It is 44,344 square feet across five non-contiguous levels, the first Soho House in the North of England, and it shares its building with Mollie’s Motel & Diner, another Soho House & Co brand, on the floors below.

The house is usually described as a homage to Granada, which is true and stops short of the interesting part.

What actually happened here is that three archives were opened. One belongs to the building, one to British textile design, and one to the North West. The rooms are assembled out of all three, and each is more specific than the coverage has allowed.

Start with the building, because its architect has gone almost entirely unmentioned.

The building is by the man who designed the Dome of Discovery

Granada’s Manchester headquarters was designed by Ralph Tubbs.

Tubbs is best known for one structure: the Dome of Discovery, the vast aluminium centrepiece of the 1951 Festival of Britain on the South Bank, and for a period the largest dome in the world. It was the single most public building of postwar Britain, a temporary demonstration of what the country thought it might become.

Five years later he was in Manchester, building television studios for Sidney Bernstein.

The other fact worth having is that Granada House, the eight storey office block, was the first commercial building erected in Manchester after the Second World War. The site was acquired in 1956, and the complex went up in stages at Bernstein’s insistence, each phase added as the company grew, rather than built all at once. It was the first purpose-built television studio complex in Britain.

The fabric is curtain-wall modernism at its most carefully specified: light grey granite walls, main façades in glass, highly polished black gabbro sills, and supports in white marble and grey limestone. That is a considered palette of four stones on a building most people file as a TV studio.

What happened inside it is well known. Coronation Street was made here. So was the Beatles’ first televised performance, and Britain’s first televised election debate.

And it carries no statutory protection. A listing application was refused in 2012, and the building remains unlisted, while the Grape Street bonded warehouse next door, built for the London and North Western Railway in 1867 to 1868, was listed Grade II in July 2018 for its polychromatic brickwork, cast-iron columns, jack-arch floors and surviving hoisting machinery.

A Victorian goods shed is protected and a Ralph Tubbs television studio is not. Which means the postwar building’s survival has depended entirely on the people who own it choosing to keep it, and they did: the Levitt Bernstein masterplan for developer Allied London retained the original façade and four of the studios.

The cloth came out of two archives

The textile story is the strongest verified material seam in the house, and it involves two separate specialists.

The first is Tibor, the British mill founded in 1945 by Tibor Reich. Reich was born in Budapest in 1916 into a textile manufacturing family and came to England to study, enrolling at Leeds University in 1936. He took the Textile Institute Design Medal in 1973. Soho House commissioned a custom abstract leopard print from the company.

There is a Manchester connection to that choice that nobody has drawn. The Whitworth, Manchester’s own university art gallery, has exhibited Tibor Reich and holds his work in its textile collection. So the mill Soho House went to is one the city’s civic gallery had already put on its walls. The commission is better researched than it has been given credit for.

The second specialist is Print Pattern Archive, which developed a bespoke woven and printed collection for the house. Their designs are drawn from mid-century archives and described as “organic textures and geometric shapes, all stylised from nature”, deliberately set apart from “the formal and structured underground style prints of the 1940s” in favour of “the relaxed sophistication that defined mid-century aesthetics.”

The method is the part worth noting. The studio describes “extensive research into original textile archives, ensuring each reproduction maintains the energetic line quality and organic appeal that made mid-century designs revolutionary.”

Those fabrics appear as headboards and hanging tapestries, and reference Manchester artists and weavers directly.

Two commissions, both drawn from archives, both from named British specialists. For a house whose whole pitch is a period, that is the difference between choosing a mood and doing the reading.

What the rooms are made of

The material list is unusually specific for a members’ club and worth setting out properly.

Reception is citrus yellow, over a floor of green and cream terrazzo. The bar is burl wood with exaggerated ribbed panelling and a bullnose marble top. A spiral staircase in antique brass and timber runs between levels.

Elsewhere: polished plaster walls, reclaimed timber floors, smoked glass light fittings, antique brass divider screens, and vintage Murano glass ceiling fixtures.

The upholstery does the colour. Navy and cream striped velvet banquettes, and velvets in deep green, lichen, grey blue, antique rose and moss, with fluted leather alongside. There are striped awnings and sheer curtains, and the eighth floor carries a retractable glass ceiling, which in Manchester is a decision with obvious consequences.

The Orange Room is exactly what its name suggests, worked in burnt orange and kept dark for DJ sets and film screenings.

The seating includes vintage Maralunga sofas, Vico Magistretti’s design for Cassina, alongside Soho Home’s own lines. Even the towels were given a bespoke orange and navy print.

Five levels, and what is on them

The plan is worth having in order, because the house is not stacked in one block.

Level one is the Soho Health Club, and it is the largest gym in the group: a weights floor, a group fitness studio, a reformer Pilates studio, sauna, steam room, infrared sauna, ice baths, a smoothie bar, and IV and compression therapies, kitted with Technogym and BLK BOX.

Level six holds 22 bedrooms, graded Cosy to Extra Large, plus an 80 square metre two bedroom apartment.

Level seven is The Studio, an events room with a central bar and a DJ booth, seating 140.

Level eight is the Club Lounge, the House Kitchen at 49 covers, and the Pool and Lounge under that retractable ceiling.

Level nine is the Club Bar and the Orange Room.

And on the roof sits a heated year-round pool of 3,013 square feet, with sunbeds, cabanas and a terrace bar, among the largest in the Soho House portfolio. It opened in April 2026, some months after the house itself.

Fifty-three artists from one region

The art programme is the third archive, and it is the most rigorous thing in the building.

The collection runs to more than 100 works by 53 artists, and the selection rule is geographic rather than thematic: every artist was born, is based, or was educated in the North West of England. It was assembled between 2023 and 2025 by Kate Bryan, Soho House’s chief art director, with Jack Lazenby, art collections manager, and it deliberately includes recent Manchester School of Art graduates alongside faculty.

The curators single out Northern humour as a running thread, particularly in the text-based work.

Named artists include Ryan Gander, Lubaina Himid, Louise Giovanelli, Sonia Boyce, Simeon Barclay, Corbin Shaw, Jamie Holman, Mary Ramsden, Sarah Joy Ford, Nicola Ellis, Parham Ghalamdar and Thomas Heatherwick.

Two commissions deserve description.

Ryan Gander made a site-specific text work on the large glass window overlooking the rooftop pool. It reads “Let the world take a turn, Dad,” and it is hand-painted to resemble a Rorschach inkblot, legible from both sides of the glass. A piece of writing that is also a symmetrical stain, on the one surface in the building that everybody swims towards.

Jack Brown contributed two works, including a sculptural installation built from repurposed snooker cues.

A collection restricted by where its makers come from rather than by what the work looks like is a harder brief to fill, and it is the reason the walls do not look like every other house in the group.

How Soho House builds a house

The company’s method is unusually well documented by the design team itself, and it explains the archives.

Candace Hickman, a lead designer, describes the starting point: “The existing site is our biggest form of inspiration and we’ll learn everything we can before arriving.” And then: “Then, we’ll visit every few months, walk the streets, and get to know the locals and the stores nearby.”

Domhnall Nolan, a senior designer, gives the material version, using Rome as the example: “Italy does stone really well, and so across Soho House Rome you’ll find travertine flooring and Verde Guatemala marble in the bathrooms, all sourced locally.”

In Manchester the local sourcing landed in the cloth and the art rather than the stone, which suits a city whose historic industry was textiles rather than quarrying.

There is one clear precedent inside the group. White City House occupies the former BBC Television Centre in London, which makes Manchester the second Soho House to move into a building that was purpose-built for broadcasting. The company knows this move.

Soho House was founded in 1995 by Nick Jones, above his restaurant at 40 Greek Street in London. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2021 and was taken private again in a deal signed in August 2025, valued at around 2.7 billion dollars, led by MCR Hotels with Apollo and Goldman Sachs, after which it delisted.

Jones has been candid about how far the idea travelled from Greek Street: “I did not think the concept would work outside London.”

Paris Armani, the house’s local head of membership, has framed what Manchester brings to it: “Manchester has always been a city of firsts, from the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution to the home of ground-breaking music scenes that shaped global culture.” And on the ambition: “By listening to feedback from members and leaning on our amazing Committee, we want the House to be a true part of Manchester’s cultural fabric.”

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy account of this house is that a London club took a famous television building and filled it with mid-century furniture.

The better account is that three separate archives were opened and the results were put in one place.

Ralph Tubbs built it, five years after the Festival of Britain, as the first commercial building Manchester put up after the war, and it survives on nothing but its owners’ willingness to keep it. Tibor and Print Pattern Archive went back into mid-century textile records and brought out cloth that had to be re-drawn rather than reprinted. Kate Bryan and Jack Lazenby spent two years finding 53 artists who all came from one region.

None of that is decoration. It is three pieces of research, and the rooms are what they produced.

The Gander is the piece that gives the game away. A sentence painted as an inkblot on a window, readable from both sides, hanging over a pool on a Manchester roof.

Look at it one way and it is a joke. Look again and it is a building telling you it has been read carefully.