Squat London: The Nilufar Pop-Up Where the Matisse and the Apartment Were Both for Sale

Interiors · Mayfair

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Squat London was the fourth outing for Nilufar Gallery’s nomadic pop-up concept, and the first one anyone could actually move into. Nina Yashar, Shalini Misra and Mehves Ariburnu filled a finished Mayfair apartment with seventy years of design and art, then put the flat, the furniture and a 1939 Matisse drawing up for sale at the same time.

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Introduction

In the summer of 2016, Nilufar Gallery founder Nina Yashar opened the doors of Flat 1, 70 South Audley Street, a 230 square metre Victorian corner apartment in Mayfair, and let the public walk through it. This was Squat, Yashar’s ongoing series of pop-up installations that stage her gallery’s furniture inside real domestic interiors rather than a white-cube space, and London was its fourth edition, following earlier versions in Milan, Paris and Beirut.

What made the London edition different was that it was finished. Interior architect Shalini Misra was brought in not to dress an empty shell but to complete the apartment properly: working bathrooms, a fitted kitchen, cornicing, marble floors. Istanbul gallerist Mehves Ariburnu, founder of Karaköy’s Galeri Mana, joined as creative advisor for the art. The result was a genuinely liveable home, open to the public Tuesday to Saturday from June until 15 October 2016, in which almost everything on view, down to a Henri Matisse drawing over the study fireplace, carried a price tag alongside the apartment itself.

That double transaction, a home for sale with its contents also for sale, is the detail worth sitting with before anything else. It explains why Misra’s brief went well beyond styling, and it explains why Yashar and Ariburnu could pull pieces spanning nearly seventy years of design and art into six rooms and have them read as a considered collection rather than a showroom clearance.

A concept four editions in, and the one that had to work as a home

Yashar founded Squat in 2012 as a way of testing her gallery’s pieces against real rooms rather than plinths, moving the concept between cities and letting each edition respond to a different building. By the time it reached Mayfair, Squat had already run in Milan, Paris and Beirut, each a temporary staging inside borrowed architecture. London asked for something else. As Yashar put it herself, this was “the first edition that someone could actually live in, where there are bedrooms, bathrooms and all the finishes are perfect.”

That single distinction changes what the project is. The three earlier editions could treat architecture as a backdrop. London could not, because the backdrop was itself part of what was being sold, through estate agents Wetherell and Knight Frank, alongside every chair and canvas inside it. A pop-up that has to function as a finished home, not just look like one for a fortnight, needs an architect doing real work, not a stylist doing dressing.

Shalini Misra’s actual renovation

Misra’s brief, in her own words, was “to be all-inclusive with the interior architecture, finishes, window dressing, furniture, lighting and art.” In practice that meant widening the apartment’s doorways and raising their heights to give the rooms a more generous scale, introducing chunky cornices and tall skirting boards throughout, and laying a monochrome geometric stone floor through the hallway and reception rooms in Nero Marquina and Thassos marble, a pattern that deliberately echoes Gio Ponti’s black-and-white Deco flooring and is mirrored in the custom cabinetry around it. Elsewhere, chevron dark oak flooring runs through the more private rooms, and every visible service, air conditioning, audio, bathroom technology, is concealed rather than left as a fitted afterthought.

Misra has described the process as a genuine collaboration rather than a straightforward handover: “Nina visited the apartment and we walked around together getting inspiration for what should go where as we stood in the spaces.” That is a meaningfully different way of furnishing a home than commissioning a shopping list to fill rooms designed in isolation, and it shows in how deliberately individual pieces are placed. The oversized 2007 David LaChapelle photograph in the hallway, for instance, was positioned specifically to play off the bold geometric floor beneath it, a decision Misra credits to walking the space with Yashar rather than working from a plan.

Nina Yashar’s furniture, room by room

The living room carries the clearest concentration of named pieces: circa-1930s easy chairs by Danish designer Viggo Boesen, a curved sofa attributed to Federico Munari, a mirrored bronze and mahogany dining table by Massimiliano Locatelli whose form was inspired by Hanoi’s Tây lake, and lighting by Lindsey Adelman. The room’s coffee table is not one object but several, a composite of rattan and croc-effect cast bronze low tables arranged to reconfigure for entertaining, alongside a woven palm rug that adds texture against the marble underfoot.

The apartment’s bedrooms carry the project’s more playful choices. The master suite pairs dove grey linen wallpaper and faux suede cabinetry with a verdant rug by Caturegli Formica and wool-upholstered Boesen chairs, and its headboard is a geometric screen by Martino Gamper, one of his Off-Cut series, turned sideways from its usual free-standing role into a piece of furniture. The ensuite bathroom, finished in Calacatta marble and dark grey stone, uses illuminated bronze-framed mirrors positioned to catch window light while still preserving privacy from the room beyond, a genuinely careful piece of detailing for a bathroom nobody was contractually obliged to finish well.

A secondary bedroom takes a lighter tone: gold-painted skirting boards, glass totem-shaped pendant lights by Bethan Laura Wood hanging above metallic rattan bedside tables, a fur bedspread, and a 1959 Positano vanity table by Ico Parisi. In the kitchen, Gaggenau and Miele appliances sit under a domed copper pendant light by Patricia Urquiola, with brushed brass details and chevron-patterned cabinet fronts carrying the geometric language established at the front door all the way through to where the flat is actually used day to day. A 1960s LB7 bookcase by Franco Albini appears elsewhere in the apartment, one of several pieces that push the collection’s furniture timeline back before the Second World War entirely.

Mehves Ariburnu’s art, and the seventy years it spans

Where Yashar’s furniture leans heavily Italian and largely mid-century, Ariburnu’s art selection reaches both earlier and later. A Henri Matisse ink drawing, Lady with a Guitar, dated 1939, anchors a small terracotta-toned study, the single oldest work in the apartment by some distance. In the living room, Julian Schnabel, Alighiero Boetti and Enrico Castellani represent the postwar and arte povera generation that grew up alongside the same Italian design lineage Yashar has spent her career championing. Andy Warhol screen prints appear elsewhere in the apartment, reportedly among the most valuable individual pieces on show. LaChapelle’s 2007 photograph in the hallway, glossy and theatrical against Misra’s Deco flooring, sits at the recent end of that same run.

Laid end to end, that is a continuous seventy-year span of work, from a 1939 Matisse to a 2007 photograph, arranged through a genuinely lived-in home rather than a museum’s chronological galleries. It is a more unusual thing to encounter than the room descriptions alone suggest: most collections spanning that range sit behind glass or on an insured wall in a private house nobody visits. This one hung in a hallway you could walk your coat through on the way to a bathroom, and every piece in it was priced to leave with a buyer.

What was actually for sale

Squat London operated as a functioning sales gallery as much as an exhibition. The apartment itself was marketed at a reported £10 million, and the furniture and art inside it were available individually, meaning a visitor could, in principle, buy the Matisse, the Locatelli table and the flat they were sitting in during the same appointment. That structure sets Squat apart from a conventional design fair stand or a gallery show with a static price list pinned by the door: nothing in the apartment was fixed in place for the run of the show the way exhibition furniture usually is, because everything, including the walls around it, was already on the market before the doors opened to the public.

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Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Squat London as a showroom, a temporary stage set for furniture that happened to be dressed convincingly. That undersells what Shalini Misra was actually asked to do, and what the project demanded because of it. A showroom does not need working plumbing behind a Calacatta marble ensuite, or cornicing correct enough to survive scrutiny from an estate agent’s buyer rather than a design-week visitor. Squat London needed both, because the apartment itself was the largest single object for sale in it.

That is what separates the fourth edition of Yashar’s Squat from the three that came before it, and it is what let Nina Yashar and Mehves Ariburnu fill six rooms with a continuous run of design and art stretching from a 1939 Matisse drawing to a 2007 photograph without the mix ever reading as random. Everything in that apartment, from the doorway heights to the drawing over the study fireplace, was there because someone had decided it belonged in a home first and a gallery second. The furniture and the art were for sale. The argument for how they sat together was not.