The art and collectible design at WOW!house 2026, from Francis Sultana's entrance hall to Elicyon's Lalique bar and a Jean-Michel Frank chair in the Misia suite.
The first thing in the house is a wall of Yayoi Kusama, George Condo and Georg Baselitz. You come through the front door into Francis Sultana’s entrance hall at WOW!house, and there it is, hung at eye level the way you’d hang it at home, not roped off, not lit like a vault. A showhouse usually opens with a flourish of fabric. This one opens with a Baselitz.
It sets the tone for what I keep noticing all the way round. The art this year is real, and a lot of it is good. A few rooms on, in Albion Nord’s green drawing room, a dark stone head sits in an arched niche on its own black plinth. It’s an Emily Young, one of her weathered faces left half inside the rock, and I stand with it longer than I mean to.
Down in Studio Duggan’s speakeasy, a brown-walled room you could happily lose an afternoon in, six small Alan Davie works run in two rows along a brass picture rail, all glyphs and private symbols. It’s art, chosen and hung as art.
That’s art carried into a room. Charu Gandhi’s home bar for Elicyon is a room built as one piece. She’s lined it almost wall to wall in Lalique crystal, and it’s the room I keep coming back to.
A Lalique ‘Swallows’ chandelier hangs over a curved alabaster bar, frosted birds caught mid-branch. Behind the bottles, a panel of blackbirds and grapes glows from within, lit like a window onto a garden that isn’t there.
There’s a clear crystal ‘Cactus’ table, a run of crystal sconces, a small frosted nude tucked into a lit niche. Lesser hands would have made this a Lalique showroom. Gandhi makes it architecture. The crystal is the wall, and the light comes through it.
Look closely and not all of that bar came off a Lalique order sheet. The bust pouffes, cream bouclé on bases of glossy amber resin, were made for the room by Elicyon with Three One Four Studio.
Step back out into the house and the same seriousness turns up piece by piece, in furniture you could collect on its own terms. In Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay’s Misia bedroom, past a pair of carved black totems by Joss Stoddart, there’s a low cream chair with broad flat wooden arms. That’s a Jean-Michel Frank ‘Elephant’, the 1939 design, sitting in a showhouse bedroom as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Stoddart’s hand is all over that room: the carved headboard is his too, made for the space.
In Salvesen Graham’s bedroom a pair of Regency ebonised armchairs from about 1810 sit by the four-poster, brought in by Max Rollitt, who has built his own dining room here around 18th-century antiques I could spend a morning on.
A showhouse used to send you home with a paint colour. This one sends me home with a list: Emily Young, Alan Davie, the Frank chair, the resin pouffes by Three One Four Studio. The art and the design aren’t two separate conversations here. They’re the same one.
WOW!house is at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour until 2 July. Go and make your own list.
