Soho Home Opens Its Doors in New York City—Just in Time for an Interior Design Boom

“It’ll have, well, everything,” Soho House Global President Andrew Carnie says of Soho Home’s new brick-and-mortar retail store New York City, the private club’s first in North America, and a physical symbol of their rapid foray into the interior design world. It’s a sweeping statement, but he’s not far off. The sprawling Meatpacking space has a lot of stuff. Cool stuff—chairs in custom Pierre Fray fabrics, velvet green couches, lamps with linen shades, candles that smell of leather, a produce stand by Alimentari Flaneur, and blooms by Brooklyn-based florist Future Flowers. The store’s layout is loft-like: there’s a dining area, a living room, and even a bedroom complete with wallpaper. It looks rather like a shoppable Soho House.

Which is exactly the point. Since opening its first clubhouse on Greek Street in 1995, the trendy-yet-homey interiors of Soho House became almost as envy-worthy as the membership itself. Almost immediately, its buzzy patrons began asking their design team to do personal homes. (It’s rumored, for example, that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex tapped Soho House’s former design director, Vicky Charles, for Frogmore Cottage.) “We’ve been doing our members' homes for 26 years,” says Carnie. “So we thought—how can we help more of them bring our house, home?”

First came the launch of Soho Home’s website in 2016 (for the U.K.) and 2019 (for North America), which offered a mix of brand-designed and found objects. Months later, the coronavirus pandemic forced everyone around the world to spend more time at home—and spend money decorating it. According to a recent report, global furniture and appliance spending grew from $373 billion to $405 billion from 2019 to 2020.

So, with this newfound interest in interior design, Soho House decided the time was right to scale. “I thought if we brought in a brilliant team that could work with you more on how to design your home, we could create something really special,” says Carnie, who was formerly at Anthropologie. Soho Home amped up their own creative production studio, designing over 800 new pieces. And, when the world opened up again, they opened physical stores to highlight them—alongside vintage finds, curated art work, and gallery spaces to highlight decorative objects and crafts made by their creative-minded members.

The curation is almost all au courant. “It’s much more forward looking—like something you would find in our newly opened houses of Paris, Austin, and Rome,” says Carnie. Bouclé pieces abound, as do green-marble tabletops. Even the vintage selections are stuffiness-averse, in step with today’s styles. “We wanted to lean more Danish and mid-century modern,” Carnie says.

In the back, there’s also an interior design consultation office, where you can ask a Soho House professional to provide design tips for one to three rooms. (Anyone can use the service, although for members it is free of cost.)

Even as the pandemic has ebbed, our interior design interest isn’t going away anytime soon: in just five years, spending for furniture and appliances is predicted to reach 481 billion (up from—in case you forgot!—the 405 billion it is today). And Soho Home is now around to help you source haute home goods—and, well, live with them.