WOW!house 2025: Twenty-Two Rooms, and the Year the Showhouse Found Its Confidence

Interiors · London

Reading Time: 8 minutes

WOW!house 2025 filled Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour with twenty-two individually designed rooms and gardens, each built from nothing by a different studio. This is a room-by-room account of what they made, and of the year the showhouse stopped feeling like a series of installations and started feeling like a single, confident argument for what a collaborative interior can be.

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Introduction

Every summer, Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour empties one of its buildings and hands it, room by room, to twenty-odd interior designers who have never worked on the same project before and will likely never do so again. They are given a shell, a brief from a sponsoring brand, and a matter of weeks to build a complete space from the studs up. What comes out the other end is WOW!house, and in 2025 it ran to twenty-two rooms and gardens, open to visitors until 4 July.

The format is unforgiving in a way most design writing does not credit enough. A single-client commission has months, sometimes years, of back-and-forth to arrive at a room. A WOW!house room has to convince a stranger walking through a doorway in under a minute, with no context and no chance to explain itself. What struck me most about the 2025 edition was how rarely that showed. Where the showhouse can feel like a run of unrelated statements shouting over each other, 2025 read more like a building with a plan, entrance garden through to garden terrace, each room aware of what came before it.

Arrival: the garden and the threshold

The sequence began outside. Alexander Hoyle, the Kew-trained plantsman behind the Artorius Faber Entrance Garden, set the tone before a single interior door was reached. Working in Forest Marble walling and Artorius Faber stone paving, he built a planting scheme, olive trees, flowering perennials, climbing roses, that had the loose, layered logic of a garden that had been there for years rather than assembled for a season. It did the job an entrance sequence rarely gets asked to do: slow visitors down before they had seen anything indoors at all.

The Adam Architecture Façade, by Darren Price, picked up that formality and gave it a frame. Fluted pilasters, sash windows and a decorative pediment, worked in neutral stone, made a case for a specific kind of English classicism without tipping into pastiche, contemporary execution wrapped around genuinely old proportions.

Inside, Victoria Davar of Maison Artefact built the Cox London Entrance Hall around a floating staircase by Excel Stairs, its curved geometry appearing to hover between the two levels it connected. Reclaimed French limestone underfoot and a bespoke Cox London chandelier, forged in darkened bronze into forms that read as more organic than architectural, gave the room the job an entrance hall in a showhouse rarely gets right: it felt like a genuine threshold rather than a lobby, the last calm moment before the rooms proper began.

Living and gathering: seven rooms built for staying in

The bulk of the show’s square footage went to rooms designed to be occupied rather than passed through, and this is where 2025’s range showed most clearly.

Chad Dorsey Design‘s Fromental Drawing Room worked a hand-painted Fromental wallpaper, its pattern drawn from natural forms, against Romo upholstery and a handcrafted Kyle Bunting rug, an Arts and Crafts sensibility pulled into a room built for comfort rather than display. A few doors along, Staffan Tollgård‘s Phillip Jeffries Study went in the opposite direction entirely: limewashed marble-dust plaster in a blue-grey that shifted with the light, chevron parquet underfoot, a room built on restraint that borrowed as much from Japanese wabi-sabi as from Scandinavian minimalism, and proved, better than most rooms in the show, that quiet can still be the most memorable thing in a building full of noise.

Alexandria Dauley‘s Nucleus Media Room solved a problem most media rooms never bother to address, that home entertainment spaces are usually the least considered room in a house. Earthy tones, sound-softening wall treatments and custom walnut joinery built around the Nucleus sound system turned the brief into something closer to a private cinema with real material intelligence behind it. Spinocchia Freund‘s Stark ‘Curator’s Room’, meanwhile, paired oak panelling with a Stark rug designed specifically for the space, its pattern built around a set of pioneering women the designer chose to honour, gallery composure with a residential warmth underneath it.

Daniel Slowik‘s Treasure House Fair Morning Room was the show’s most deliberately historicist gesture, and it held up under scrutiny. The room was built around the collecting instincts of Sir Richard Wallace, the nineteenth-century philanthropist whose bequest founded the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, a specific, checkable reference rather than a generic nod to “antiques.” A neoclassical fireplace from Jamb anchored a room furnished with pieces sourced through Treasure House Fair exhibitors, and the result argued that a period reference done with this much precision reads as scholarship rather than decoration.

Kelly Hoppen CBE‘s Visual Comfort & Co. Living Room needs less introduction than most names in this list; her work on Thames City’s Kelly Hoppen penthouse has featured on this site before, and the WOW!house room worked the same register in miniature, damask textiles, silk tassels and tonal upholstery, warmed by Visual Comfort & Co. lighting into the enveloping, unhurried atmosphere her name has come to promise. Pirajean Lees‘ Dedar Library closed out this group with the show’s most introspective room, a soft circular plan lined with mirrored columns that made the space feel simultaneously open and cocooning, built around a custom record-inspired rug and warm timber shelving, a room designed for solitude in a building that mostly asked to be walked through.

Private spaces: rest, ritual and escape

Six rooms handled the parts of a home that get the least public attention and, in this edition, some of the most careful design.

Tomèf Design‘s Fortuny + Bonacina + Barovier&Toso Primary Bedroom centred on a bespoke Tiara bed by Fortuny, draped in fabric heavy enough to anchor the room on its own, lit by Barovier & Toso’s Venetian glass fixtures and softened by Bonacina’s woven pieces, an unapologetically Italian room that leaned on craft rather than restraint to make its case. 1508 London‘s House of Rohl Primary Bathroom took the opposite tone, natural plaster walls, curved joinery and Victoria + Albert’s sculptural freestanding bath, built around wellness rather than glamour, and closer to a spa retreat than a fitted bathroom.

Alessandra Branca‘s Casa Branca Bedroom brought a genuinely different geography into the mix, vintage and antique finds layered against pieces from her own Casa Branca collection, vivid prints and textured fabrics reading as Mediterranean rather than English, a useful reminder that a showhouse built almost entirely from British and European studios still has room for an American sensibility that argues design confidence and restraint are not the same thing. Laura Hammett‘s Samuel Heath Bathroom pushed further into glamour still, bronzed metal, warm stone and gold églomisé glass panels built around Samuel Heath’s sculptural bronze fixtures, an Art Deco reference specific enough in its material choices to earn the comparison rather than simply claim it.

Nicola Harding‘s Drummonds Powder Room made the case, room by its nature the smallest in the show, that scale has nothing to do with ambition: a tented ceiling, deep colour and a marble double vanity fitted with Drummonds hardware turned a few square metres into the most theatrical space in the building. Thurstan‘s Hector Finch Snug closed the group on a deliberately quieter note, aged timber, slubby linens and natural stone lit by Hector Finch fittings, built explicitly as a retreat rather than a set piece, and better for it.

Entertaining and social spaces

Peter Mikic‘s Benjamin Moore Dining Room was the loudest room in the show and knew it, jewel-toned walls and ceiling wrapped around a monolithic Kaizen Furniture dining table, surrounded by vintage Lucite chairs chosen specifically to catch the light rather than disappear into the background, colour used as the entire argument rather than a finishing touch. Toni Black of Blacksheep took the opposite approach with the Shepel’ Home Bar, hiding the room behind sliding doors clad in straw marquetry and building the interior around tonal timber and curved custom joinery, personalised with original artworks by Black’s own daughter, a detail that gave a commercial-scale design studio’s showhouse room a specifically personal note.

Kitchen and outdoor living

Ben Pentreath Studio‘s Lopen Joinery Kitchen was, on paper, the most straightforward brief in the show, and the least straightforward to execute well. A solid oak island beneath an octagonal skylight anchored a room built from bespoke Lopen joinery, painted cabinetry, dovetail joints and antique brass hardware standing in for the sort of English country-house kitchen Pentreath has built a career on, at Nansledan and elsewhere, arguing that traditional joinery is a technical discipline rather than a nostalgic mood board.

Three rooms took the show outside. Goddard Littlefair‘s Perennials and Sutherland Courtyard worked Moorish and Mediterranean references into a genuine planting scheme, water features and tiled geometry set against citrus, rosemary and lavender. Emma Sims-Hilditch‘s Sims Hilditch Courtyard Room ran a softer, more English palette, sage greens and soft whites opened to the garden through French doors, indoor and outdoor treated as one continuous room rather than two rooms with a threshold between them. And Randle Siddeley, the landscape architect who also holds the title 4th Baron Kenilworth, closed the show with the McKinnon and Harris Garden Terrace, a living wall and a built-in fireplace wrapped around a genuinely usable outdoor room, built on the same belief in gardens as restorative space that has defined his work for four decades.

What WOW!house 2025 got right

Twenty-two designers, working to twenty-two separate briefs from twenty-two different sponsoring brands, could easily have produced a showhouse that felt like a trade fair with better lighting. What distinguished 2025 was how rarely that happened. The strongest rooms, Tollgård’s study, Slowik’s morning room, Harding’s powder room, shared a willingness to commit fully to one idea rather than hedge across several, and the sequence as a whole, garden through to terrace, held together as a single walk rather than twenty-two unrelated stops.

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Final thoughts

A showhouse built by twenty-two designers who have never worked together is, by design, a gamble on whether the parts add up to more than their sum. WOW!house 2025 mostly won that gamble, not because every room was equally strong, but because enough of them, Tollgård’s study most of all, were confident enough in a single idea to make the weaker rooms around them feel like part of the same conversation rather than a separate one. That is a harder thing to engineer than any individual room in the building, and it is the reason this edition is worth remembering specifically as 2025’s, not folded into a general impression of what WOW!house always does.