Tour of Soho House(s) Around the World.

Founded in London in 1995 as a private members’ club for people in the creative industries, Soho House & Co has since opened clubs across Europe and North America, as well as restaurants, cinemas, spas and bedrooms. Opening their first House in London’s Soho in 1995, today the company boasts 14 clubs around the world, with more in the works. The Houses are in diverse locations, but the company’s mission has always been the same: to create a comfortable home away-from home for it’s members.

The club was the brainchild of a quiet fifty-something-year-old Brit by the name of Nick Jones. The original London club opened in 1995 quickly emerged as an arty, egalitarian alternative to stuffy clubs around the city. The first overseas branch launched in Manhattan’s then-edgy Meatpacking District eight years later, thereafter moving on to Hollywood and so forth. With their mysterious admissions policies — in which a vague ideal of “creativity” is valued above net worth and job titles — and ongoing resistance to ostentation, Nick Jones and his team have assembled the ingredients of a pleasant life and then marketed them to a community of followers. (Jones offers three words of life wisdom: eat, drink, nap. Brilliant! But where is travel in all this?)

Anyway, I hope you’ve brought your passport with you, because we are about to take a World Tour of some of our favourite and most significant properties in the Soho House stable. Bon voyage!

Soho Beach House, Miami Beach // A restored art deco building in South Beach, designed to provide a lush enclave of public/private, indoor/outdoor rooms in a densely-populated area of Miami Beach. The boutique hotel combines the restoration and retrofit of the historic Sovereign Hotel from 1940 with a new 15-story oceanfront tower. A variety of gardens and outdoor public spaces were developed around the building and property.

Soho Beach House has 50 bedroom, offering beach or bay views, they are individually designed, featuring one-off vintage pieces sourced on the West Coast, and bathrooms that draw on classic British influences. The design promotes indoor-outdoor connectivity with spaces flowing from street-facing entry court to the pool, garden, dune and ocean beyond.

Soho House Berlin // Completed in 2010, the 40 room Soho House Berlin is hosted in the historic 1928′ building in Torstrasse, a late Bauhaus structure located in the heart of the Mitte district. Eagerly anticipated by Berlin’s buzzing elite, its opening did not disappoint.

The interior design of the building is collaboration between Soho House’s in-house designer Susie Atkinson and the newly commissioned Michaelis Boyd Associates (Tim Boyd and Alex Michaelis). The team successfully brought a sense of the old Berlin lifestyle into the rawness and nakedness of today where exposed concrete beams are combined with traditional paneling to create this marriage of two styles.

Soho House Chicago // A modern, chic hotel that elegantly honours the industrial roots of its building with retaining wooden panels and fire-safety glass from the original early 20th-century belt factory that once occupied the site. Designed by Soho House founder Nick Jones and the group’s design director Vicky Charles, the six-story building in Chicago’s up-and-coming industrial West Loop neighbourhood retains aesthetic vestiges of its past life as a warehouse for the Chicago Belting Factory.

Originally built in 1907, the interiors remain lined with concrete and worn, exposed brick and have the same high ceilings and expansive floor plan of the early 20th-century factory—albeit with the less humble additions of chandeliers, a boxing gym, and a rooftop pool.

Soho House Istanbul // Istanbul’s Palazzo Corpi in the historic Beyoğlu district is now home to the thirteenth and largest Soho House in the world. Serving as a private members’ club for the arts and entertainment industry, this latest international branch of the Soho House is housed within a former American embassy building built in 1882 using imported marble from Carrara, Italy.

The interiors are decorated with rosewood window and door frames, and the ceilings are painted with frescoes of Greek mythological figures. The hotel itself features 87 rooms, surrounding a beautiful central courtyard. The rooftop pool and bar is a highlight for guests wanting to take in the brilliance of this hotel.

Soho House New York // A private members’ club and hotel in Manhattan, Soho House New York is built over six floors and 4,100 square meter of an old warehouse building in the Meatpacking District.

[Images © Soho House.]