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Sketch London Has Always Been More Than a Social Media Moment

Long before Instagram discovered its pink rooms and egg-shaped loos, Sketch was already turning a Mayfair townhouse into London's most theatrical dining experience.

Even those who’ve never set foot in Sketch are likely familiar with its maximalist, colorful interiors. The London dining destination is one of the city’s most Instagrammed spots, often attracting guests just for its egg-shaped toilets and ornate afternoon tea. 

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But despite its flashy appearance, Sketch, which houses multiple restaurants and bars within a historic 18th-century townhouse, wasn’t created for the sake of attention—and particularly not of the online kind. In fact, Sketch existed before Instagram debuted in 2010. Its owner, Mourad Mazouz, acquired the space a few years after successfully opening North African restaurant Momo in 1997. The plan was for a friend to install a nightclub in the Grade II-listed building, which was previously the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a headquarters for British suffragettes, and one of Christian Dior’s London ateliers. That plan didn’t come to fruition.

“He didn’t want it,” Mazouz tells Observer, speaking in Sketch’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant, The Lecture Room, in early March. “I had no clue what I was going to do with the building. Should I keep it? Should I give it back? But the beauty when you’re younger is you don’t really think. So we decided to jump and see where we would land.”

Mazouz had a hospitality background, and at the time, he also ran a record label. He wanted to converge all of his interests in one place—art, food, music, partying. “There wasn’t really a vision,” Mazouz admits. “It took me four and a half years to build this thing, and I didn’t even know what it was going to be. I just wanted to give it as much of my heart as I could.”

Mazouz knew he would need a chef with a similarly creative spirit. In 2000, he visited Pierre Gagnaire’s eponymous Paris restaurant to ask if one of his chefs wanted to join Sketch. The project reminded Gagnaire of his original restaurant in Saint-Étienne, Le Clos Fleuri, which shuttered due to bankruptcy in the mid-‘90s, despite earning three Michelin stars. So he replied, “Why not me?”

“Coming together with Mourad was a chance to redo what I didn’t achieve,” Gagnaire says. “It was also an opportunity to work with somebody who was not from my world. We were so different culturally, and that was interesting.”

Sketch opened in 2003 as part restaurant, part bar, part art space and part nightclub. The Gallery, now a more casual bistro-type restaurant where afternoon tea is served, showcased video installations during the day. The space, conceived by Mazouz and Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, was originally a blank white room with 12 screens. “Most of them were quite provocative,” Mazouz says of the videos played there. In the evenings, it transformed into a restaurant, and later each........

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