Bridgerton, But Make it Modern
If you thought the six floor, 90,000 square foot RH Gallery in New York’s Meatpacking District was massive, behold the California-based homeware emporium’s first international outpost, RH England, the Gallery at the Historic Aynho Par, situated in a 400-year-old landmark estate in the Cotswolds spanning 73 acres and over 60 rooms. It’s all very Bridgerton, in tasteful shades of grey and beige.
RH, which recently expanded into hospitality, has plans to open stores in seven European cities—London, Paris, Milan, Munich, Dusseldorf, Brussels, and Madrid—by 2025. To plant the flag, RH Chairman & CEO Gary Friedman set his sites on Aynho Park, a primarily Classical Revival style structure with vestiges of Continental Baroque first built in 1615 and later expanded and refurbished by the famous architect Sir John Soane in the early-19th century. It’s one of the UK’s rare Grade 1 listed buildings, which include Windsor Castle and Chatsworth House.
“Our goal was to find a magical place that resembled anything but a retail store,” says Friedman. “So far, I think we’re off to a good start and that’s what we found here—a place of wonder, enchantment and history.”
Indeed, RH England doesn’t look much like a conventional place to, well, shop. The space seamlessly integrates home furnishings collections from RH’s Interiors, Contemporary, Modern, and Outdoor ranges with rare art, antiques and artifacts from across the globe. But the flagship attractions are the restaurants including the Orangery, a live-fire dining experience, and the Loggia, a French limestone fountain-filled outdoor venue in which to enjoy wood-fired pizza while taking in naturalistic landscapes conceived in the 18th century by English garden design pioneer Capability Brown. There is also a Wine Lounge, a Tea Salon, and a Juicery.
For architecture buffs, other highlights include an exhibition in partnership with Sir John Soane’s Museum in London that details Soane’s life and works at Aynho and other English country houses through architectural drawings, models, and artifacts and an Architecture & Design Library filled with vintage, contemporary and rare out-of-print books. One in particular, a 1521 Italian first edition of Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius’s classical text De Architectura libre Dece, is a tome which guides the RH design ethos. In it, Vitruvious urges readers to seek balance, symmetry and perfect proportions—all elements that can be seen across the property.
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