Sotheby's

Sotheby's has traded from 34-35 New Bond Street since 1917, and a decade-long renovation completed in 2019 turned the row of Georgian townhouses behind that facade into twenty-one connected exhibition galleries, the largest expansion of the building since it opened. The scale is easy to underestimate from the street: reinforced floors and walls in the ground-floor galleries were built to take almost anything a sale demands, from a classic car to a monumental sculpture, and the rooms range from small chambers built to spotlight a single object to temple-like spaces flooded with natural light.

The house uses these galleries for its own calendar of previews, gala sales and client dinners rather than running a conventional events-hire business, and private access to them is arranged directly through the house rather than published as a product. A collector dinner set among an Old Masters exhibition, or a reception held around a season's Impressionist and Contemporary highlights, sits entirely within what Sotheby's already does for its own clients on New Bond Street. LIT.ME arranges access on the same basis: by enquiry, through the relationship, never as a walk-up booking.

The building itself is the draw as much as any single room. A cantilevered stone staircase, lit from beneath each tread, rises through the centre of the ground floor past a colonnade of white columns; Sotheby's own restaurant, reopened in a brasserie style with teal leather banquettes, sits just off the galleries for a smaller private lunch or dinner. For a client whose event calls for the presence of the art world rather than a conventional ballroom, there are few rooms in London that do it as plainly.