Sketch

Sketch occupies a 1779 townhouse on Conduit Street that has, in earlier lives, held the Royal Institute of British Architects, a suffragette headquarters and Christian Dior's London atelier. Restaurateur Mourad Mazouz took it on in the late 1990s and reopened it in 2003 as a single address holding several wildly different restaurants and bars, each handed to a different designer and artist. The result is less a venue than a small world of rooms, and it has become one of the most photographed interiors in London.

The Gallery is the centrepiece. India Mahdavi's sunshine-yellow scheme, with its curved velvet banquettes and globe lamps beneath a coffered dome, replaced the millennial-pink room that made Sketch an Instagram fixture, and the walls now host a rotating programme of artist commissions. In January 2026 the space reopened with Jonathan Baldock's installation The Gathering: 84 ceramic masks ringing the room, sculptural flowers around the bar and cocoon-like forms suspended in the dome. Beneath the famous egg-shaped pods, the retro-futuristic East Bar runs a sunken central bar and a resident DJ into the early hours, which makes it the most natural fit here for a late, music-led private night. Elsewhere there is the leopard-print Parlour with its neon halo lights, the forest-mural Glade, and upstairs the Lecture Room and Library, Pierre Gagnaire's two-Michelin-starred dining room.

For an intimate DJ event, the appeal is the ability to take a single distinct room rather than a generic function suite. The whole house is built around design and theatre, the East Bar already carries music every weekend, and the address could not be more central. It is a venue for a host who wants the room itself to be the talking point.