Soho House Is Championing Local Art Scenes to Build Its Global Collection

In the late 1990s, British artist Sarah Staton hung 30 of her artworks in the bar at 40 Greek Street, the original Soho House location in London. She wasn’t commissioned to do so—she saw empty walls and decided to fill them with framed works on paper. A year and a half later, Staton returned to collect the works and found that 10 were missing. Faint rectangles remained on the smoke-stained wall where they’d hung.

When Staton asked where the pieces had gone, she learned a fellow artist had purchased them and left her an envelope of cash. The buyer, it turned out, was Damien Hirst. Some two decades later, Soho House’s chief art director Kate Bryan acquired the remaining works, still in Staton’s possession, and installed them at Soho House White City in West London.

“The early days of the art collection were kind of like the Wild West,” Bryan said in a talk during Art Basel Miami Beach at Miami Pool House, the club and hotel group’s second space in Miami, alongside Soho Beach House. Today, with 10,000 works on view—none in storage—across 45 locations, curating the art of the international members’ club happens under slightly less wild circumstances. Yet Soho House’s roots in community, and its focus on artists—particularly local ones—remain.

The Soho House art collection’s official beginnings trace back to Dean Street Townhouse in London in 2009, a project overseen by artist Jonathan Yeo and curator Francesca Gavin (also a writer, editor, and artistic director of viennacontemporary art fair). Working in collaboration with Yeo, Gavin grew the collection to 3,000 works across more than a dozen clubs, from Malibu to Istanbul.

“Everything was about reflecting the art in that city and reflected what was happening at that moment,” Gavin explained, “sometimes responding directly to the history of the place or the site itself.”

Under Gavin’s eye, the luxe, international hotels and clubs became homes to works by esteemed artists like Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Yinka Shonibare. From the start, the collection relied on a barter system, whereby artworks are exchanged for memberships and credits to use at the clubs. The practice was inspired by the days of Picasso trading paintings for his stays at the idyllic French hotel La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence.

As word of the Soho House art collection spread, Gavin had little trouble convincing artists to take part. “I was approached by incredible big artists all the time who wanted to be part of the collection and be among their peers—emerging and established,” she said. “The barter system was an incredible way to bring artists and vibe to each House.”

Since 2016, Bryan and her team have expanded the collection to 10,000 works while honing its local focus. Each new House is bedecked in works by artists who are “born, based, raised, or trained” in the area, she explained. “Typically what you want is a global Soho House member to visit the Portland House [in Oregon], for example, and immediately get a sense of what the art scene is like in that city specifically.”

At Miami Pool House—a gated oasis aptly centered around a lush pool, with plenty of walls surrounding its lounge areas, bar, and restaurant—Bryan and fellow curator Anakena Paddon tapped the local scene for 60 works to reflect Miami’s art identity. It’s an admirable representation of emerging and established names alike, including Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Angel Otero, Woody De Othello, N. Dash, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Malaika Temba, and Mark Fleuridor. The site also features several commissions, including a vibrant mural by Carolina Cueva, and site-specific installations by Rose Marie Cromwell (who also transformed a corridor of Soho Beach House this year) and Miami-based artist Cornelius Tulloch.

For artists like these, the club’s collection offers a chance to represent Miami’s art scene to visitors. “My interest in having work in the Soho House collection really started with the idea of the Houses capturing the story of a city,” Tulloch said. “Being from Miami, when I found out about Pool House, a space that really tells the Miami story, I thought, ‘That’s great because it becomes an archive of the city and this particular time within our art market.’”

Tulloch credited Soho House for fostering relationships beyond Miami, too. “When I went to my residency in Paris, it allowed me to make a community there, where I met other creatives by just going to a talk or a panel hosted by a curator at the House,” he shared.

This attitude is reflected by artists in other cities, too. For instance, Nashville-based artist Vadis Turner noticed that the curation for the space there began with deep engagement with local artists. “Kate Bryan and Anakena Paddon visited over 40 local artists to learn more about their work,” Turner said. “It was clear to all of us that featuring local artists was a top priority.”

Looking ahead to 2025, Bryan is excited to open a new Soho House outpost in Manchester. “It’s our first house in the north of England,” she said. “It’s got such a nice scene for artists, and I’m really excited about that, because it’s one of those houses where you know that the opening of the house actively contributes to the art scene becoming a bit more robust.”

Bryan is also working on Soho House’s forthcoming opening in Tokyo, which will respond to the city’s distinct art and design sensibilities. “That House will look wildly different to the others because it’s so rooted in Tokyo’s unique identity,” Bryan said. And she’s also planning a refresh of the curation at Shoreditch House in London, with plans for a “legacy wall of all the artists that really put the East End of London on the map in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Thematic curation has become something of a cornerstone, too. A prime example is Brighton Beach House, opened in 2022, which features a collection of LGBTQIA+ artists’ works, curated by Gemma Rolls-Bentley, author of Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between. And on a smaller scale, the curators have taken to filling rooms with visual themes. At Soho House Portland in Oregon, there’s a “rose room” full of artworks inspired by the flower—a reference to the city’s nickname. When we spoke, Bryan was on the lookout at the Miami fairs for depictions of eyes to feature in another of these thematic selections. And she’s in the early stages of planning a forthcoming refresh of the Soho Beach House collection that will focus on photography.

During Miami Art Week, the original Miami location of Soho Beach House is perhaps best known for the glitzy parties in its oceanside tent. This year, for instance, the members’ club hosted a Porsche party with a performance by pop singer Amaarae and an installation by Miami artist Typoe. However, the site is also host to one of Bryan’s favorite traditions: an annual artist lunch, which brings together the artists of the collection from across Soho House’s international locations. “We always joke that the point of the lunch is to be sort of totally unproductive. Just put loads of artists in one space and allow that community to move forward,” Bryan said.