Thirty years in

In 1995 we took the rooms above a restaurant on Greek Street in Soho and put in a few sofas, a bar, and a single rule: leave your status at the door. It was meant for the people who worked in the neighbourhood, in film and theatre and the magazines, who wanted somewhere to be themselves after the day was done. Word travelled the way good rooms do.

Three decades later there are Houses in cities we never expected, with pools and spas and bedrooms and screening rooms, and a Cowshed that started as a farmhouse bathtub. What has not changed is the feeling at the door: that you have arrived somewhere private and warm, where the work waits, the fire is lit, and the company is the point.

We started above a restaurant on Greek Street, with a sofa nobody wanted to leave and a rule that the work could wait until after lunch. The idea was simple: a room where creative people could be off duty together, where what you made mattered more than what you earned. Thirty years on, the Houses have multiplied and the fires still burn low. The sofa, more or less, is the same one.