The luxury home furnishings brand’s first London flagship is bold, beautiful and replete with magical design flourishes.
The phrase ‘furniture emporium’, here, is woefully inadequate. The RH London Gallery—which opened in June, via a star-studded event attended by Margot Robbie and Theo James—is not so much a bold statement as a love letter to London’s vociferous appetite for tastefully appointed grandeur.
The London home of RH (the American luxury home furnishings brand formerly known as Restoration Hardware—see page 100 in our Legends of Luxury feature) brings together furniture, interiors, art, architecture, and food and wine over five levels and almost 54,000 ft².
It is housed in what used to be known as Uxbridge House: a Palladian mansion, opposite the Royal Academy of Arts, designed in 1721 by Italian-born architect Giacomo Leoni for the 1st Earl of Darnley. Norman Foster-founded Foster + Partners collaborated on the meticulous makeover of the building, which is now graced with a 136-seat restaurant, a rooftop garden, and a Wine Bar and Tea Salon replete with finely veined Amani Spanish marble.
The Architecture & Design Library—a space graced with white-oak herringbone floors and museum-style plinths—is the first space visitors enter, via a Roman Doric portico. A 1521 edition of De Architectura, by Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius, rests on a plinth at the centre of the foyer.
The lift connecting its five levels has curved glass panels and warm, champagne-gold steel accents, while the restaurant, The Treasury—once a banking hall—sits beneath nearly 26-ft-high Roman columns, propping up a gold-leaf coffered ceiling and tiered chandeliers made from hand-blown Venetian glass. Expect British-inspired classics such as rib roast and fish and chips, cooked on custom Molteni rotisseries, as well as towering sculptures built of caviar specialties and other seafood.
The first floor’s Piano Nobile state rooms feature the original ceilings by 18th-century stuccoist Joseph Rose. Ascending to the second floor, the Perch—the work of Anouska Hempel, the New Zealand-born former actress turned hotelier and interior designer—juxtaposes smoked glass, blackened églomisé walls and an Absoluto Nero marble bar with a terrace garden containing laurel trees, diamond-laid marble floors and enormous glass birdcages inspired by the domes of Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan.
On the third level, RH Outdoor is installed beneath a vast ridged skylight of triangular glass panels and European oak beams, among fountains, pleached plane trees and open fireplaces. Next door, meanwhile, the World of RH Lounge has a 360-degree hologram suspended inside a case of bronze and fluted mirror.
Whichever part of this extraordinary addition to London’s luxury scene you step into, the effect is deliberately and unashamedly theatrical, furnishing RH’s wares with the kind of opulent context they deserve. Environments are designed not simply to accommodate guests, but to envelop them (the reader is advised to devote an entire day to their first visit).
It’s been a busy year for RH. In July, the company announced a multi-year global design collaboration with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team, under which RH will serve as the squad’s global interior design and luxury furnishings curator. As of late 2026, RH-designed environments will appear across trackside destinations, hospitality venues, clubs and the team’s UK headquarters, with Abu Dhabi first, followed by Miami, Monaco, Silverstone and other major races.
Back in London, the boutiques of New Bond Street and the ateliers of Savile Row have a noisy new neighbour. And we mean ‘noisy’ as an emphatic compliment.
