Soho House is seriously upping its art game

While globally, Soho House recently completed a $2.7 billion deal to once again become a private company, locally, the members’ club is focused on modernizing its art. Since the brand began acquiring and curating art in 2009 at Soho House 76 Dean Street, its growing collection has become one of the biggest points of contact with members, driving programming and driving engagement. Rooted in the location of each home and featuring emerging and established artists from that city, the Soho House Art Collection has grown over 17 years to include over 11,000 works of art.

“There will be 15,000 artworks in the next five years,” says Kate Bryan, chief artistic director of Soho House. Since joining the company in 2016, Brian has focused on growth, taking the collection from 2,000 pieces to where it is today. The acquisition strategy revolves around direct relationships with artists and galleries. Once their work is selected for the House, they are invited to become members. Brian does not buy art at auction. Each work is owned by Soho House and remains within the collection. Her team created a special database containing geographic tags (place of birth, base, education) to index artists for specific house openings. Now, the pieces are on loan to major museum exhibitions, such as the Tate’s spring-summer exhibition on Horvin Andersson. A coffee table book is also in the works.

“Galleries are very supportive of our collection, because it’s a public showcase for the artists,” Brian says. “They don’t just disappear into a house that no one will ever see again.” “Artists come in and see their work, and they see people interacting with it. We use our collection. We don’t store stuff. If we get it, it’s for somewhere and it goes up.”

Both Soho House West Hollywood and Soho Beach House in Miami, which opened in 2010, recently unveiled new art that dramatically changed their aesthetics. Los Angeles artist Eric Oller has created a massive commission for the West Hollywood Club, the largest in Soho House history at 65 feet long and 6.5 feet high, a panel of four site-specific panels that wrap around the grand entry staircase. Oller is known for blending pop culture references with his love of classical painting, abstracting history, nature, and contemporary visual clues onto canvases of a cinematic scale.

On the opposite coast, when Soho Beach House came in for a comprehensive design refresh, the art team took the opportunity to ask: “What story do we want to tell now?” With a curatorial focus on photography, Miami House’s original collection has been updated with an international roster of artists who reflect the city’s evolving spirit and its standing in the art world as host of the most flamboyant annual gathering, Art Basel. Established and internationally known artists such as Isaac Julien, J.R., Laurie Simons, and Marilyn Minter collide with established and emerging artists such as Sarah Maple, Cornelius Tulloch, Anna Carey, and Marcus Maddox, who work with Polaroid, performance-based photographs, collage, cameraless photography, digital manipulation, hand-printed works, lenticular prints, canvas, and woodcuts. All of these Soho Beach House artists are also represented in 32 Soho Houses worldwide. “Try to think of another city that welcomes as many people for art in a huge international moment,” she says. “We thought we should reflect that spirit in this collection.”

While Miami’s art scene has catapulted into the pop culture stratosphere, Los Angeles has transformed from “secondary market” into the global center of contemporary art, fueled by film, photography, design, studio culture and art fairs like Frieze LA (February 26 to March 1 at Santa Monica Airport). Soho House has reflected this rise through the art collections in its network of four properties in Los Angeles. West Hollywood, co-curated by Kate Bryan and Anakina Badon between 2023 and 2025, highlights artists who were born, reside, or trained in Los Angeles. The collection is anchored by luminaries including Ed Ruscha, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari, alongside notable contemporary names such as Walid Beshti, José Parla and Hebro Brantley. The Luckman Club, installed in late 2024, includes Los Angeles painters John Regan, Erin Wright, Greg Ito, Bowie Tiffany Chow, and Emily Ferguson. “Los Angeles has now become an important center for contemporary art with the Freeze, major museums, and many artists moving to the city,” Brian says. “The California art scene has always been amazingly important, but it seems like the spotlight is back on in a new way.” Soho House will host Frieze events at both West Hollywood House and Holloway House throughout Los Angeles Art Week.

Brian’s organizational philosophy reveals how the collection comes to life. Its approach intentionally deviates from the traditional gallery or museum model in favor of a more immersive, member-informed approach.

“I don’t have a white box,” she says. “It’s a different way of organizing, but one of the benefits I have is that I spend a lot of time with members and I can get their opinion on something a year before I do it.” “As we build the permanent art collection, it becomes a starting point for the house. We invite artists to come and have conversations and artists are on both boards, because they are part of our membership.”

In turn, this member-first approach has helped form a group whose influence extends beyond the role itself.

She says: “Some of the works that were acquired in the beginning are from artists whose work is impossible to obtain now.” “There’s a lot in the early collection that’s still really going strong now, and all of these artists have gone on to amazing fame but it’s not like we’re sitting around becoming future stars. We don’t worry too much about price increases or longevity. We think about its relevance to today, and the artists we believe in, want to support and be around. Then, as a happy byproduct, the collection starts to have a greater legacy and cultural value.”