The Restaurant That Painted an 18th-Century House Pink

sketch, The Gallery · 9 Conduit Street, Mayfair, London · India Mahdavi

sketch takes a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse built by James Wyatt in 1779 and paints one of its rooms the exact pink of a 1980s prom dress, hangs two hundred and thirty-nine David Shrigley drawings on the walls in a grid, and puts a rainbow-lit chamber of egg-shaped toilet pods one floor below it, and asks diners to move between all three without once explaining the joke.

Viacheslav Munister · 2026-09-12

Nine Conduit Street has been many things since James Wyatt designed it as a private Mayfair residence in 1779: a townhouse, a home to a cyclists' society and a balloonists' club, a meeting place for the Suffragette movement, and for a long stretch simply a building nobody had a good use for. In 2002 the restaurateur Mourad Mazouz bought it without a clear plan beyond the conviction that a Grade II listed Georgian house deserved better than sitting empty, and turned it into sketch, a single address containing several rooms with almost nothing in common except the belief that a restaurant can also be a piece of design criticism.

One colour, no exceptions

The Gallery's most disciplined decision is the one that looks the most frivolous. India Mahdavi's 2014 redesign commits to a single millennial pink across walls, ceiling, carpet and the tulip-shaped velvet banquettes that ring the room, refusing the usual designer's instinct to break up a strong colour with a neutral counterweight. The effect is less a themed room than a habitable Rothko: from the doorway, the pink reads as one continuous surface, and only up close does it resolve into fabric, plaster, marble chevron flooring and two hundred and thirty-nine individually framed drawings. Mahdavi had three months to complete the redesign in 2014; what was originally planned as a two-year installation ran for eight.

Two hundred and thirty-nine punchlines

Those drawings are by the artist David Shrigley, whose deliberately crude, deadpan style has always worked by refusing to look expensive, which is exactly what makes it survive being hung in a room this ornamental. Gridded salon-style across every wall in identical frames, the drawings function first as texture, a uniform pattern that completes the pink room the way wallpaper would, and only on closer inspection break apart into two hundred and thirty-nine separate, absurd little jokes about failure, boredom and bad advice, the largest single body of his work ever exhibited in one place. Sketch has cycled artists through the space since, including a 2022 redesign with Yinka Shonibare that swapped the walls to sunshine yellow, but the pink Shrigley scheme was reinstated, evidence that the combination reads as the room's real identity rather than one look among several.

A room built to be walked through, not just seen

Photographed empty, the Gallery can look like a stage set waiting for its cast. What the room is actually built for shows up once staff and diners are moving through it: the pink absorbs and reflects the low light so consistently that people become part of the same continuous surface as the walls and banquettes, dressed in grey uniforms that read as a deliberate, muted counterpoint rather than an oversight. Even the crockery keeps the bit going, hand-lettered in the same wry, self-referential type as the drawings, printing the restaurant's own Mayfair address onto the plate a foie gras terrine is served on, so that the joke about self-awareness reaches the food before it reaches the table.

The joke that follows you downstairs

What separates sketch from a merely photogenic dining room is that the design logic doesn't stop at the door. One floor down, under a barrel-vaulted ceiling tiled edge to edge in dozens of stained-glass colours, a row of sleek white egg-shaped pods holds the restaurant's toilets, each one a private capsule glowing faintly under the coloured light spilling down from above. A weaker restaurant would treat the bathroom as an afterthought once the dining room had already done the work of being memorable; sketch treats it as one more room in the same argument, that a building can be historic, expensive, slightly ridiculous and completely serious about all three at once.