Soho House Berlin Celebrates 15th Birthday With Private Dinner, New Art

To celebrate its 15th anniversary in Berlin, the private member’s club Soho House decided to do a little redecorating. But this being Soho House — the organization now has 44 different clubhouses in 18 countries; annual membership in the U.S. costs around $5,000 — that didn’t mean throwing a bit of paint around. It meant expanding and rearranging its own art collection in Berlin.

After around a year of curation and selection, the organization’s art collection manager, Jack Lazenby, has added another 35 artworks to the Berlin acquisitions, bringing the total to 75 altogether. Soho House itself has around 10,000 artworks in all of its locations. The additions in the German capital include works by Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset and Sol Calero.

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“Obviously we have art in all the houses but I think there’s something special about the connection Soho House Berlin has with the art world,” said Kate Bryan, global director for art at Soho House, who was in Berlin to unveil the new collection and join selected artists at a private dinner. “I think that really comes down to the fact that when we first opened here, Berlin was just on fire. Everyone wanted to be exhibiting here, the contemporary art scene was booming.”

Bryan recounted how, at the Berlin site’s opening, the historic building wasn’t ready even though the opening party, with international guests, was going ahead. The exterior was still covered in scaffolding and protective fabric.

“So Nick [Jones, the founder of Soho House] just thought, you know, to make an asset out of a problem,” Bryan said. “He asked one of our colleagues to go and buy some spray cans. Not that any of the artists were urban artists. But they just flung the paint into the hands of people who were basically the who’s who of the London art world at the time.”

That’s how Damien Hirst ended up painting a shark on the material on the scaffolding (he signed it too) and conceptual artist Sue Webster, whose work can be found in the Guggenheim Museum and the British Museum, wrote “Soho Haus” on another sheet. Both of those impromptu, irreverent “paintings” were kept and still hang in the lobby. They have been joined in the ground floor space by paintings from American performance artist Donna Huanca, who lives in Berlin, and an oil-on-jute painting by up-and-coming Berlin artist Sophie Reinhold.

Unfortunately for casual visitors, most of the other new artworks are on the members-only floors higher up in the eight-story building.

Berlin has changed a lot since Soho House opened here, Bryan conceded, when asked how the organization keeps its cachet after all these years.

“I was always really impressed by something Nick Jones said,” she noted. “He said we must be careful not to try to be ‘hot.’ Because if you’re, say, the hottest new restaurant in town, eventually you’ll burn out. I think he was right. You can’t really manufacture that [cachet] on an ongoing basis. So I think you just have to keep doing what you do, and as authentically as you can. And probably try to be a bit chill about it too,” she concluded with a smile.

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