The Audley’s Artful Interiors Captivate Mayfair

Opening Shot is a column that peeks inside new hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops with interiors to drool over.

THE AUDLEY

Location: London

Designers: Luis Laplace, Here Design

On Offer: In 1888, fresh off finishing the Lord’s Cricket Ground pavilion’s exterior, Thomas Verity designed a stately Victorian building on a fashionable Mayfair corner. More recently, Hauser & Wirth co-founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth fell for the place. Their hospitality company Artfarm—itself fresh off opening The Fife Arms in Braemar and Somerset’s Roth & Bar Grill—has transformed Verity’s triumph into The Audley, five floors encompassing a trio of hospitality ventures and, of course, world-class art.

They brought in Paris’s Luis Laplace as lead architect on the layered interiors. A ground-floor pub greets the public; a private restaurant sits above, with private dining and games rooms above that. “Using the much-loved Zürich-based Kronenhalle as a reference,” Laplace says, “we set out to design a contemporary interpretation. By collectively sharing our language and universe with the artists involved, we have created coherent spaces in which art and design flow naturally, avoiding the pitfalls of obsolete artistic or aesthetic statements.”

London design firm Here devised The Audley’s visual identity. “In our research,” says design associate Thomas Lacey, “we discovered a cryptic crossed X symbol at the heart of the Audley family crest.” This marked the spot as iconography for the project. “We used texture and finishes to change how you experience the X depending on your place in the building—from bold stonework on the external corner of the pub to the playful print on the pub matchboxes, and all the way up to the engraved brass coins of the cloakroom. It keeps evolving, like the building itself.”

Standout Features: On the ground floor, The Audley Public House carries on the great pub tradition, while executive chef Jamie Shears updates culinary classics like Garden Pea Rice Porridge and London Rarebit with locally sourced ingredients at the Mount St. Restaurant upstairs. Four private dining spaces are known as “Curious Rooms”, themed in Swiss, Italian, Scottish, and Games iterations.

Here Design used jesmonite to recreate stone cast signage, and brought in Jack “Signwriting Jack” Hollands to hand-write gilded signs of the pub’s history. But given the owners’ backgrounds, the real draw is the art, which abounds throughout. Anj Smith hand-painted a take on tentacle erotica for the turret of the Games Room bar, while the late Phyllida Barlow crafted a mosaic of hand-painted paper for the pub’s ceiling. And for the Mount St. Restaurant floor, Rashid Johnson went for broke with a palladina mosaic called Broken Floor.

Photography by Simon Brown and Sim Canetty-Clarke.