London can feel overwhelming at first: so many places, exhibitions, members’ clubs, cafés, galleries, restaurants, hotels, and hidden corners constantly overlapping between the art, fashion, and cultural worlds. What makes the city special is that creative inspiration isn’t concentrated in one single neighbourhood or institution, it’s everywhere, often hidden behind an unmarked door, inside a restaurant, above a bookstore, or in the middle of a quiet Mayfair street. This guide isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but rather a curated selection of my fav places that capture a glimpse of the artsy side of London.
1. The Row
The entrance to The Row’s Mayfair flagship greets visitors with a Turrell piece, illuminating the space with its slowly changing light display. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who collaborated with architect Annabelle Selldorf on the space, incorporated unique pieces throughout the entire store from an Isamu Noguchi sculpture to a John Chamberlain crushed-car piece and furniture by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand.
2. The Red Room at The Connaught
A hidden jewel for late-night drinks. The Louise Bourgeois central piece make it feel closer to a collector’s private salon than a hotel bar. When hotelier Paddy McKillen described his vision to Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ long-time assistant, Gorovoy brought up the painting packaged for another exhibition from a basement, and McKillen purchased it on the spot. Alongside it: Bourgeois’ scarlet hologram from 1998 and works by Jenny Holzer, Ti-a Thuy Nguyen, and Trina McKillen. The room is almost entirely a space for female visionaries.
3. Mount St. Restaurant
Part of the Hauser & Wirth universe, this is where British cuisine and the London art, fashion, and collector crowd casually overlap. Rashid Johnson’s floor commission Broken Floor is a palladiana mosaic of different marbles that visitors can explore, stand on, and physically interact with. Over 200 works feature throughout: Warhol, Matisse, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston. Even King Charles has eaten here, choosing the main public room over the private dining. You’ll understand why when you’re sitting beneath a Freud at lunch.
4. Abuelo
One of the chicest coffee stops in London. The name means grandfather in Spanish, and the room is built on that logic: large communal tables, interiors that reference the 1970s are designed and built on site without trying too hard, filled with the kind of creative crowd that somehow always looks effortlessly cool. Great coffee and matcha.
5. Tate Modern
The Rothko Room is one of the most well-known displays in Tate Modern and the nine Seagram Murals that hang there were never originally meant for a museum at all. Rothko was commissioned to paint them for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, the most prestigious public commission ever awarded to an abstract expressionist, but came to believe a fashionable restaurant was not the right home for such work, and withdrew. He gave them to the Tate instead.
6. Lagana
Lagana takes its name from a Greek flatbread, and the whole restaurant is built around that spirit, generous, loose, made for sharing. With paper tablecloths and crayons left on the tables so everyone can draw throughout dinner, the whole restaurant somehow turns into a collective sketchbook by the end of the night.
7. Adret
Iykyk. There is almost no information to be found on their website. No e-commerce. No Instagram feed of product shots. The analogue approach is entirely the point. Everything is handmade in Indonesia and only available in-store. Adret is a menswear label founded by Adam Rogers, who designed for Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label, and Seto Adiputra, who was the editorial director of a leading menswear publication in Southeast Asia and is also the brand’s photographer, known for his unhurried visual language. Together they travel between London and the Indonesian mountains, working side-by-side with local artisans. The store on Clifford Street is the physical expression of everything they believe: somewhere between a collector’s apartment, a gallery, and a dream.
8. Maison Assouline
More than a bookstore, a lifestyle fantasy for people obsessed with art, fashion, photography, and beautiful objects. Hidden behind the shelves is the Swans Bar, serving cocktails, wine, and snacks. It feels like old-world intellectual glamour.
9. Gallery Hopping in Mayfair
Start around Cork Street and wander through Pace, Almine Rech, Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Thaddaeus Ropac and more. The beauty of London is that the galleries are embedded into the rhythm of the city, you move from museum-quality exhibitions straight into cafés, restaurants, and auction houses within minutes.
Bonus point: attend an auction. Even just sitting in the room at Sotheby’s or Christie’s during an evening sale is one of the coolest experiences in the art world. The viewing days before a sale are open to anyone, you can stand within inches of works that will sell for millions.
10. Réalisation Par
Réalisation Par has one of the most quietly seductive boutiques in London. The brand built its following entirely through the quality of its silks and a very specific fantasy of how a woman might dress, and the store translates that same logic into a physical space: warm, chic, and effortlessly pretty. The pieces almost sell themselves once you're inside. And then there's the iconic photo-booth :)
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London is spoiling us with great exhibitions, always
Saw this just in time for my London visit!