The highlights of WOW! House and our key takeaways you can use to elevate your space

The WOW! House 2026 event

The Architecture of Arrival: Making a First Impression

One of the enduring tests of any showhouse is how it begins. The moment of arrival — the pause before the door opens, the threshold that separates the everyday from the extraordinary — sets the register for everything that follows. At WOW! House 2026, this threshold was rethought entirely, with the arrival sequence becoming, for the first time, a genuine collaborative work of architecture, interior design, and landscape design.

Responsibility for the exterior fell, as it did in 2025, to Darren Price of Adam Architecture, but this year he had company. Working in dialogue with The Gardenists — the landscape design practice founded by Hay Hwang and Simon Kitchin — and with Studio Enass, this year’s WOW! House arrival became the most cinematically conceived entry sequence the event has yet staged.

The Size Group Facade

The main facade, sponsored by Size Group and clad with the weight of genuine architectural conviction, represents Price at his most architecturally literate. He describes his creative lineage with precision: Sir John Soane, Nicholas Hawksmoor, George Dance the Younger, John Nash — the architects who shaped Georgian London’s most enduring face. Price does not imitate these masters but iterates upon them, adding a sheltered loggia with elevated platforms to introduce depth and rhythm, giving the front elevation what he calls “a heightened sense of arrival.”

This year he reworked elements from his 2025 WOW! House design — a sustainability decision as much as an aesthetic one — introducing newly built architectural gestures that give the facade fresh drama without starting from scratch. Among the new details: a series of bespoke door knobs designed in collaboration with Pemberton & Sons, each one informed, as Price explains, “by its architectural context. The texture of the stone, the fluting of the columns and the profiles of the cornices have all been distilled into objects of remarkable clarity and weight.” Here is the argument for architecture as language — the idea that even the smallest hardware element should speak the same grammatical dialect as the building it inhabits.

The light fittings framing the loggia come from Hector Finch, one of WOW! House’s key event partners. The brand used this year’s event to debut a new verdigris finish on its classic lantern forms — a patinated, oxidised surface that suggests age without imitating it, and that brings a richness and warmth to the stone and render of the facade. “It gives the structure a tactility that feels both crafted and enduring,” Price notes.

The Garden Folly Facade and Room

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. DARREN PRICE OF ADAM ARCHITECTURE FOR HECTOR FINCH. 

For the first time in WOW! House’s history, a second architectural element flanked the main house: the Garden Folly. Conceived as a freestanding pavilion that draws on the eighteenth-century English tradition of the garden folly — those delightful, purposeless architectural jokes that Georgian aristocrats installed in their grounds as acts of witty self-indulgence — the Folly was designed by Price in collaboration with Hector Finch and integrated with the interior created by Studio Enass.

The folly tradition, Price explains, is about “a moment of permission” — a place where the rules of classical architecture are observed just enough to be knowingly broken, where formality dissolves into fantasy. Four Athena lanterns and bespoke finials in Hector Finch’s new verdigris finish formed the Folly’s defining architectural ornaments, their aged patina giving what might have been too-bright a composition exactly the right note of settled antiquity.

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. STUDIO ENASS.

Inside the Garden Folly, Studio Enass — the practice of Enass Mahmoud, winner of Next in Design 2025 — created one of the most personally charged rooms in the whole house. The space is small, jewel-like, and vibrating with intention. Mahmoud, who grew up in Northeast Africa before relocating to the UK, designed the room as an encounter between two worlds, two geographies, two modes of gathering.

The dominant hue is a deep, celebratory red — not the aggressive scarlet of a London phone box, but the deeper, more complex crimson of cultural ritual. “Red is the colour of cultural celebration,” Mahmoud explains, “with a step into a different world.” This is red as meaning, not merely as pigment. Gemstone greens provide counterpoint, appearing in the emerald-fringed cocktail table at the room’s centre — a piece whose bullion fringe acknowledges the trend for passementerie that runs throughout WOW! House 2026. The walls are dressed in Amalfi Silk, a wallcovering by Phillip Jeffries, whose warmth and sheen subtly reference the North African interiors that formed part of Mahmoud’s visual education.

The furnishings — made by Origins Designs using fabrics from GP&J Baker and trims by Samuel & Sons — are arranged in what Mahmoud describes as a majlis configuration: a traditional Arabic and North African seating arrangement designed for gathering and conversation, usually found in living rooms or receiving rooms. By introducing this form into a garden folly, she creates an unexpected frisson — the domestic and the architectural, the intimate and the ornamental, the personal and the cultural, all in one small, perfectly realised room.

The bespoke Reverie pendant by Gladee Lighting hangs at the room’s centre, its form inspired by the fluted geometry of a scallop shell — one of the sea-inspired motifs that appear, in different guises, throughout the showhouse. And as you turn to leave, a shell mosaic frames the doorway, the last thing you see before stepping back into the main sequence of rooms. Details like this — the discovery moments, the rewards for looking carefully — are what separates WOW! House from every other trade event in the calendar.

The Artorius Faber Entrance Garden

Photo Courtesy Of DCCH. THE GARDENISTS.

Before stepping inside the house itself, visitors passed through the Entrance Garden, designed by The Gardenists — the practice of Hay Hwang and Simon Kitchin — in partnership with Artorius Faber. This is a team known for prestigious commissions including the Suzhou Flower Show, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and OWO Residence by Raffles; here they brought that same calibre of spatial thinking to an indoor-adjacent threshold space.

The composition centres on a natural stone lion’s-head wall fountain set into a limestone foundation, framed by a monumental rounded arch. Dark marble frames the arch itself, giving the structure real architectural weight, while fragrant climbing plants weave upward through the frame — a planting decision that introduces scent as well as sight into the visitor’s first moments in the house. “It speaks to the enduring virtues of natural materials, traditional craftsmanship and considered planting,” Hwang and Kitchin say of the composition, “and a quietly powerful reminder that a truly exceptional space engages all the senses.”

This is the promise of WOW! House delivered before you have even crossed the first interior threshold: design as full sensory immersion.

The Rooms: A Complete Tour of WOW! House 2026

What follows is a room-by-room account of the full WOW! House 2026 showhouse, in the sequence visitors experienced it — beginning after the facade and ending on the garden terrace. Each room is examined in detail: its designer, its brand partner, its colour palette, its key pieces, and the wider design ideas it represents.

Room 1: Entrance Hall by Francis Sultana

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. FRANCIS SULTANA.

If there is one room at WOW! House 2026 that announces itself with total authority from the first instant — before you have had time to adjust your eyes, before you have taken in any specific detail — it is the Entrance Hall by Francis Sultana. Few designers working in Britain today carry quite the same combination of impeccable taste and deeply personal vision. Sultana, who also serves as artistic director and CEO of David Gill Gallery, has spent decades at the intersection of craft, art and interior design, and his approach to the WOW! House entrance hall is nothing less than a statement of aesthetic philosophy.

The brief was broad — an entrance hall — but Sultana chose to interpret it through a very specific cultural lens: the great British entrance hall as it existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These were rooms with a particular social function — the threshold between public and private, between the formality of the street and the intimacy of the house — and they were characterised by a combination of grandeur and eclecticism, antique furniture alongside contemporary curiosities, old masters hanging beside mirrors and maps.

Sultana updated this tradition without diluting it. The space layers museum-worthy antiques with contemporary art and richly hued paintings. A pair of intriguing portraits face each other across the room, the kind of ancestral-seeming faces that might have been acquired at auction or inherited through a family that cared about its walls. A fringed banquette — a reference to the passementerie trend that surfaces throughout the house — is stationed near the entrance, flanked by glamorous giltwood armchairs that sit either side of a glass-topped coffee table.

The sculptural moment of the room is the Grotto standard lamp by Mattia Bonetti, commissioned through the David Gill Gallery — a piece that Sultana has long worked with. In patinated bronze with a richly baroque sensibility, the lamp is simultaneously historic and thoroughly contemporary. “His ability to deftly reference historical motifs to design contemporary yet timeless pieces is unrivaled,” Sultana says of Bonetti. “It embodies the essence of my room scheme — one that is rooted in the history of the grand British entrance hall but also looking forward.”

The colour palette is anchored by deep greens — the verdant, hunting-coat greens of the English landed tradition — offset by the warm tones of the wooden floor and the gilded details of the furnishings. There is no stridency here, no desire to surprise through brightness. The intent is richness, depth, legibility. This is a room that rewards slow looking, the kind of space where you pause at the threshold not because you are uncertain, but because you do not want to rush what is ahead.

For his first WOW! House participation, Sultana chose to make what might be the most traditional room in the whole house. In a showhouse that is full of innovation and novelty, that courage is itself a kind of boldness. “Contemporary and historic design together” — it is his maxim, and in this entrance hall, he delivers it with total conviction.

Room 2: Turnell & Gigon Group Drawing Room by Albion Nord

From the gravitas of the Sultana entrance hall, visitors move into the Drawing Room designed by Albion Nord — the studio founded by Camilla Clarke and Ben Johnson — in partnership with the Turnell & Gigon Group. Where the entrance hall spoke of the great British tradition with the respectful seriousness of someone who truly loves it, the drawing room takes those same references and does something more playful, more unexpected, more purely joyful with them.

The architectural conceit at the room’s core is a departure from WOW! House convention: Albion Nord changed the very shape of the space. Rather than working within the rectangular envelope that most WOW! House rooms occupy, they created an octagonal drawing room — a reference to the octagonal drawing rooms that appeared in English country houses during the Georgian and Victorian periods, where the unusual geometry encouraged a particular mode of intimate, circling conversation.

Above this octagon rises a domed ceiling with a skylight at its summit, the whole composition bathed in natural light. A sash window adds to the sense of grandeur. The walls are clad entirely in ‘Titli’ by Filling Spaces for Turnell & Gigon — a powder-blue hand-blocked linen of remarkable beauty, its blocked pattern giving the surface a subtle animation that changes as the light moves across it during the day.

But the room’s most astonishing decorative gesture is the cornice. Rather than the plaster dentil moulding or egg-and-dart profile one might expect from a Georgian-inflected interior, Albion Nord commissioned a cornice made entirely of tassels. The idea grew from their research into Passementeries de l’île de France, an historic textile mill that has been producing exceptional passementerie since the eighteenth century. The tassel cornice is simultaneously a joke — a knowing subversion of architectural convention — and a genuine triumph of decorative invention. It is the kind of detail that makes you look twice, then laugh with delight.

Four arched niches in the walls serve four different functions: one frames the entrance, another contains a bespoke bar, the third houses a curved banquette, while the fourth displays a piece of sculpture. “The space has conversation at its heart,” says Albion Nord founder Ottalie Stride — and the niches, by creating distinct zones within the unified octagonal volume, generate exactly that: different speeds of encounter, different moods within a single room.

Two Fenton sofas, measuring more than seven feet long apiece, anchor the room. Upholstered in a heavily textured neutral linen with gently sculpted arms and deep feather-wrapped cushions, they balance the grandeur of the architectural envelope with a warmth that invites sitting, staying, talking. Tim Page rugs layer across the floor, adding texture and further warmth. There are antiques throughout — soulful objects that give the room age and character and the sense of a life actually lived within these walls.

The palette — powder blue, cream, warm neutrals, with gold accents in the lighting and furniture hardware — is restrained but not cool. This is a room that functions as a kind of resolution: architecture and decoration, formality and welcome, history and freshness, all held in careful equilibrium. It is one of the most complete rooms in the house.

Room 3: Lalique Home Bar by Elicyon

From the drawing room’s open, airy octagon, visitors step into something altogether more jewel-like and intimate: the Lalique Home Bar, designed by Elicyon, the practice founded by Charu Gandhi. This is WOW! House as cabinet of curiosities — a room that rewards patience and rewards the visitor who moves slowly, who looks into corners, who steps closer to the surfaces rather than passing through.

The commission could not have been better matched to the studio. Elicyon has built a reputation for interiors of extraordinary material richness, spaces where the density of craft is managed with remarkable precision so that what could become oppressive becomes instead magnificent. Here, that skill is deployed in the service of Lalique — the French glass and crystal house founded in 1888 by René Lalique, whose opalescent, sinuous forms defined the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements and whose modern incarnations retain much of the same chromatic magic.

Gandhi’s concept was architectural: she created a room within a room, an inner sanctum accessed through an arched doorway, so that the experience of entering the bar becomes itself a discovery. “I wanted to share Lalique within contemporary architecture,” she explains. “You have a room within a room, with moments of Lalique.” Over one hundred Lalique pieces are incorporated into the space — not displayed in a static, vitrine-like way, but integrated into surfaces and architecture so that they catch and transform the light at every turn. Hidden alcoves, each revealing a Lalique piece, are scattered throughout the design — a device that Frederick Fischer of Lalique compares, with characteristic eloquence, to “an advent calendar for design lovers.”

The bespoke chandelier was designed in collaboration with Lalique and Iberian Lighting, bringing together crystal and silk shades in a composition that manages simultaneously to be sculptural and atmospheric. “This interplay between strength and delicacy, structure and softness, allows the piece to feel both sculptural and quietly immersive,” Gandhi says.

The Swallows chandelier is among the most iconic Lalique pieces on display; its birds in flight through crystal bring something almost narrative into the architectural programme of the room. The bar stools — their marquetry surfaces adding another layer of craft to the composition — sit on a bamboo silk, jute and wool rug that grounds all the luminous softness above it.

The colour palette is warm gold and amber — the natural palette of Lalique crystal when light passes through it — offset by the deep, cognac-toned woodwork of the bar structure itself and the deco geometry of the overall layout. Art Deco is the acknowledged reference, and in its deco proportions and its love of luxurious materials applied with architectural precision, the Lalique Home Bar is one of the most conceptually unified rooms in the house: a single sustained argument about what luxury means.

Room 4: Shepel’ Library by Róisín Lafferty

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Roisin Lafferty.

Between the vivid gold and amber glamour of the Lalique bar and the explosive chromatic fireworks of what awaits in the next room, Róisín Lafferty’s Shepel’ Library acts as a moment of beautiful darkness — a pause before the colour drama escalates.

Lafferty is an Irish-born designer whose work is characterised by what might be called disciplined sensuality: rooms of the utmost material richness, managed with great architectural precision. The brief here was a library, and she chose to interpret it through a reinvention of Art Deco’s architectural grandeur — sweeping curves of bespoke joinery, a dark and moody palette, intricate marquetry and high-gloss lacquer, all crafted by Shepel’, the London-based bespoke furniture and joinery specialist whose precision woodwork is the room’s technical heart.

“Libraries represent something profoundly resonant to me,” Lafferty explains. “They are places of introspection, imagination and cultural memory. They hold stillness, but also possibility.” She conjures a world — quite deliberately, quite specifically — where tempo softens, where everything outside fades. Hidden alcoves and concealed doors punctuate the joinery, their existence only gradually discovered as the visitor moves through the space. A tucked-away sensory installation allows guests to enter the designer’s creative psyche, an immersive moment within the room itself.

The Shepel’ joinery — in dark-stained wood with marquetry inlays — gives the room its architectural character. The shelving is seamlessly integrated into walls panelled in the same material, so the room has the quality of being carved rather than furnished: you sense that the books and objects exist within the structure rather than upon it. The palette is emphatically dark — near-blacks and deep, earthy browns, with the warm gold of inlay details providing the only relief.

A limited-edition abacus-like pendant produced in collaboration with Atelier001 hangs at the room’s entry point, a candy-apple red pop against all that darkness — one of the most unexpected and perfectly judged chromatic decisions in the whole house. Its geometric forms echo in the conical cocktail table that sits within the room, the two pieces in silent conversation across the space.

What the Shepel’ Library achieves is a kind of temporal displacement. You feel, inside it, that the world outside is very far away. The darkness, the density of the joinery, the depth of the shelving — all of it conspires to produce the sensation that libraries have always promised and rarely delivered: genuine immersion in something beyond the everyday.

Room 5: Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon by Young Huh

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Young Huh.

After the contemplative darkness of the library, WOW! House 2026 makes one of the most audacious moves in its five-year history: it detonates colour.

The Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon by New York-based designer Young Huh is the room that most visitors will remember longest. It is the room that generated the most press, the most social content, the most conversation. And yet it is not colour for colour’s sake — it is colour as autobiography, as cultural memory, as scholarly argument made visible.

Huh’s concept grew from her Korean heritage and from a sustained engagement with *minhwa* — the distinctive tradition of Korean folk art that flourished from the eighteenth century and was characterised by bright, flat colours, stylised imagery, and a deeply symbolic vocabulary. In minhwa, every element carries meaning: pine trees represent longevity; cranes, immortality; peaches, the heavenly life; cats ward off evil spirits. The Fromental paintings that decorate many of the room’s fifty-five inset lacquered boxes draw on precisely this tradition, bringing minhwa narrative into a twenty-first-century London showhouse.

But Huh makes a more complex argument than simple cultural celebration. Her inspiration was the Millions Room at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna — a small room in the imperial apartments where Oriental lacquer miniature paintings were set within Rococo gilt frames, creating a synthesis of East and West, historic and contemporary, that felt like a genuinely new thing rather than a simple borrowing. Huh sees parallels between that court synthesis and what is happening in contemporary interior design: the integration of Korean aesthetic sensibility with Western modernism, specifically the hard-edged geometric clarity of Donald Judd, the coloured light of Dan Flavin, the primary grid of Piet Mondrian.

“I was looking at the colors and realised it pairs well with modernism,” she says. “The story of Minhwa modernism.”

The fifty-five boxes that cover the walls are themselves a stunning device. Some are lacquered in single, flat colours — high-gloss blocks of pure Benjamin Moore hue that function as quasi-monochrome paintings. Others contain the minhwa panels by Fromental. The colours chosen by Huh are not Benjamin Moore’s familiar neutrals but its most exuberant, most playful, most unapologetically vivid offerings: Galápagos Turquoise, a clear, sharp cyan that seems to vibrate against its neighbours; Citron, a zesty yellow-green that tips toward lime; Picante, a hot orange with red undertones; Jade Garden, a saturated mid-green; Magenta, exactly what it promises; and Grape Juice, a deep aubergine that grounds the more primary shades. The classic Chantilly Lace — Benjamin Moore’s much-loved warm white — provides the wall background, ensuring the boxes read as objects against a neutral field rather than disappearing into a painted wall.

A frowning cat hangs in the corner above a banquette designed by Huh and upholstered in ‘Rivoli’ fabric by Manuel Canovas — one of the minhwa’s symbolic figures, occupying the domestic space with a charmingly sceptical expression. At the room’s centre, Deglan’s wood, lime plaster and pewter Eido dining table from the Charles Burnand Gallery holds an array of vases and objets, each adding further layers to the chromatic and cultural composition.

The floor is a bold black-and-white chevron — another reference to both Korean geometric tradition and Western mid-century modernism — and the ceiling features a large, elaborate paper lantern, its circular form providing the only curve in what is otherwise an emphatically rectilinear composition.

“I hope people will feel joy and wonderment,” Huh says. She achieves exactly that, and something more: the Minhwa Salon is one of those rare design achievements that genuinely changes how you think about the interaction between colour, culture and personal narrative.

Room 6: Phillip Jeffries Morning Room by Sara Cosgrove

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Sarah Cosgrove.

The Morning Room by Sara Cosgrove, created in partnership with Phillip Jeffries, offers a perfect tonal counterpoint to the chromatic intensity of the Minhwa Salon. Where Huh’s room shouts with joyful exuberance, Cosgrove’s whispers with elegant restraint — and the whisper is no less powerful for being quiet.

Cosgrove is an Irish designer based in Dublin whose work consistently explores the intersection of the feminine and the architectural, the soft and the precise. Her concept for the Morning Room grew from a deeply specific emotional brief: a retreat from the overwhelming velocity of the modern world, a room for the rituals that technology is rapidly displacing — reading print publications, writing by hand, having unhurried conversations.

“My concept is a quiet, uplifting analogue sanctuary,” she explains. “A room that resists the velocity of modern life — a fantasy really.” In realising this concept, she chose as her hero material the ‘Aura’ wallpaper by Phillip Jeffries: an ethereal mural whose watercolour waves of grey, blue and lilac wash across the walls in soft, barely-there layers that she describes as evoking “the lightness of a couture gown.” The surface is subtly lacquered, giving it a diaphanous quality — sometimes matte, sometimes softly reflective, depending on the angle and the light.

The palette is celadon and cream, with delicate notes of lilac throughout. These are colours of extraordinary refinement — hues that can look insipid in the wrong hands, but that Cosgrove deploys with total confidence, trusting the quality of the materials and the precision of the tonal layering to make them sing. The Topfloor by Esti rug on the floor mirrors the tranquil blues and greens of the mural, reinforcing the sense that the whole room shares a single, carefully sustained atmospheric register.

The Victoria Stone fireplace is the room’s architectural spine — a subtly crafted, beautifully balanced statement that avoids ostentation while simultaneously being a serious piece of sculptural work. The Fiore wall lights by Pure White Lines, with their milk-glass shell-like forms, add to the sea-inspired vocabulary that surfaces in multiple rooms throughout WOW! House 2026 — one of the event’s quieter recurring motifs.

The Morning Room is also, specifically, a room for books — for the analogue act of choosing a volume and sitting with it, without interruption, until it is finished. The shelves are present but not overwhelming; the objects are few and thoughtfully chosen. Nothing competes with the envelope of pale colour and exquisite material surface that forms the room’s entire emotional argument.

Room 7: Samuel Heath Primary Bathroom by Rigby & Rigby

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Rigby & Rigby.

The first of three bathrooms at WOW! House 2026, the Samuel Heath Primary Bathroom by Rigby & Rigby — the luxury residential design firm founded by James Ashfield and Jason Stewart — establishes the year’s most defining bathroom trend: the idea of the bathroom as destination, as escape route to an elsewhere both geographical and psychological.

Rigby & Rigby’s destination of choice is a convergence of Scandinavia and Japan — two design traditions that share a fundamental commitment to material honesty, natural warmth and meditative calm. At the room’s centre sits a round, wooden *ofuro* soaking tub — the traditional Japanese deep bath, here made in beautifully finished timber. The gentle, specific scent of Japanese cedarwood fills the air, a detail whose sensory precision speaks to how seriously Rigby & Rigby take the full immersive brief.

The walls are timber-clad, their planking running vertically in a nod to Scandinavian bathhouse tradition. The ceiling features a lattice motif designed in-house by Rigby & Rigby’s Make Lab team, directly inspired by Kumiko — the precise geometric joinery pattern found on traditional Japanese *shoji* screens, whose interlocking forms are created without nails or adhesive, each element cut to fit with micrometric precision.

The chair and Japanese-inspired stool, provided by Ceccotti, are upholstered in handwoven textiles designed by Sudō Reiko for Nuno Fabrics in Tokyo — a design studio whose woven work sits at the very highest level of contemporary textile production. These pieces are not merely comfortable or visually appropriate; they are genuine works of textile art, and their presence in a WOW! House bathroom is a declaration of the same ambition that animates the whole event: to bring craftsmanship of the highest order into spaces that are usually considered utilitarian.

The stained oak panelling and stepped ceiling feature above the central bath were produced by James Wellesley Bespoke Interiors. The floor-mounted single-lever mixer tap in anthracite and brushed nickel from Samuel Heath — the Birmingham-based manufacturer of architectural hardware who partner the room — has the kind of quietly authoritative presence that only the best hardware achieves: you notice it without quite knowing why, and then you cannot stop noticing it.

The palette here is warm and dark — deep timber tones, soft graphites, the pale warmth of natural linen — with the whole composition united by an extraordinary commitment to material quality. This is a bathroom that makes you want to spend a very long time in it.

Room 8: Salvesen Graham The Collection Primary Bedroom by Salvesen Graham

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Salvesen Graham

Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham are among the most beloved figures in British interior design — a partnership that has produced, over two decades, a body of work characterised by extraordinary pattern, confident colour, and an unfailing sense of domestic warmth. Their rooms always feel lived-in: not cluttered, not precious, but genuinely inhabited, as if the person who uses the space actually loves and chooses every object within it.

The Collection Primary Bedroom — created for WOW! House 2026 in partnership with Salvesen Graham’s own brand — is entirely consistent with this vision, and with the tradition of the British Country House bedroom updated for the contemporary collector. At its centre stands a mahogany-framed four-poster bed, handmade in the United Kingdom and based on an antique design, whose classical proportions give the room its architectural spine.

The Constance wallpaper — a trailing floral design of considerable beauty — covers the walls in a pattern of subdued, harmonious hues: chocolates, roses, dusty pinks, warm creams. The bed linens mix a rosy tonal stripe with delicate floral buds; the curtains combine woven fabric, chintz and cotton poplin in a layering of pattern and texture that is characteristically Salvesen Graham. When the designers describe the room in one word, they both choose “layered” — and layering, in their vocabulary, means something very specific: the accumulation of materials in close tonal ranges that produce richness without chaos, complexity without confusion.

The bookshelves deserve particular attention. They are neither colour-coordinated nor curated into photographic stillness; they are genuinely full of books and objects, a shelf clearly assembled by someone who reads and collects and does not tidy away. Artwork is hung directly from the shelves themselves, propped rather than fixed, creating depth and movement in what might otherwise be a flat vertical surface. This is the “bookshelf wealth” aesthetic in its most authentic expression — not as a performative gesture toward intellectual credentials, but as the natural by-product of a life lived among objects one actually loves.

A crystal chandelier hangs above the bed; an ornate wooden desk sits to one side, its pink chair adding a note of femininity. The overall effect is of a bedroom that belongs to someone with refined tastes, deep cultural interests, and the confidence to surround herself with the things she loves without apology.

Room 9: Munder Skiles Courtyard by Richard Miers Garden Design

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Richard Miers Garden Design.

Between the dense interior rooms — their layers of pattern, their rich palettes, their accumulated objects — the Munder Skiles Courtyard by Richard Miers Garden Design offers exactly the interlude the visitor needs: a breath of green air, a pause beside water, a moment of the kind of timeless elegance that has been the hallmark of great English garden design for three hundred years.

Richard Miers has been designing gardens for nearly three decades, with projects ranging from RHS Chelsea Flower Show Main Avenue gardens to commissions in Moscow, Sardinia and London. He won the RHS Chelsea People’s Choice Award in 2022 and Best Show Garden at the Suzhou Flower Show in 2024. At WOW! House, he was commissioned by Munder Skiles — the New York-based firm whose garden furniture occupies a uniquely authoritative position in the world of outdoor and indoor-outdoor design — to create a space that functions simultaneously as room and garden.

The result is a composition of quiet, considered beauty. A modernist fountain by Torc Pots occupies the centre of the courtyard — a form whose curves and clean proportions speak to a contemporary sensibility while remaining entirely at home with the classical structure of the space. The fountain conceals a delightful practical detail: it doubles as a wine cooler, with a built-in unit keeping a bottle at the perfect temperature. “Cheers to the three beautiful multistem *Platanus x acerifolia* I brought into the space as well,” Miers says, acknowledging the London plane trees that provide the courtyard with its essential element of mature, established plantings. “Their structure is completely ‘wow’, imparting maturity and presence on the courtyard.”

Munder Skiles’ Swan metal lounge chairs occupy the space — pieces whose curvaceous form Miers loves precisely for its adaptability. He uses their products not just as furniture but as art, hanging pieces on the walls as sculptural objects in their own right. Wicker willow planters made by a specialist craftsman he has long admired add warmth and natural texture to what might otherwise be a harder-edged composition.

The palette is determinedly muted: stone, green, warm grey, the natural colour of weathered materials and lush foliage. “Muted colors, timeless elegance,” Miers says, summing up his intention precisely. “Just a refresh and to calm things down from the other rooms.” The Courtyard succeeds perfectly as a reset — a place to breathe before heading back inside for more of WOW! House’s extraordinary interior accumulation.

Room 10: Black Edition at Romo Speakeasy Salon by Studio Duggan

The Speakeasy Salon by Studio Duggan — the London-based practice founded by designer Tiffany Duggan — is one of the most talked-about rooms in WOW! House 2026, and for good reason. It is a room with a strong, fully formed concept, a confident aesthetic sensibility, and an almost theatrical understanding of how a space can shift in character depending on the time of day and the activity it contains.

Duggan began with a character: a stylish, multitasking woman who needs her primary room to function across the full spectrum of contemporary life — a workspace in the morning, a lounge in the afternoon, an entertaining space by evening. The spatial response to this programme is a room with no straight lines whatsoever. Everything curves — the sofas, the desk, the bar counter, the walls. The flow created by this pervasive curvature means that the different zones of the room merge into each other without visible transition, so that the transition from work to relaxation to entertaining feels natural and unforced.

The hero material is Black Edition for Romo’s ‘Miri’ — a double-sided chocolate brown linen-blend wallcovering with the most subtle, expensive-looking sheen — used to clad the walls entirely. The effect is of a room that seems to absorb rather than reflect light, creating an intimacy that is almost physically felt. The sofas are upholstered in Black Edition’s ‘Myriis’, a luxurious velvet in deep aubergine — this room’s chief contribution to WOW! House 2026’s defining colour conversation around dark, indulgent purple.

The ‘Holden’ table by Duggan’s own furniture brand Trove does double duty as desk and cocktail surface — a piece whose adaptability is its elegance. The central ottoman serves as additional seating or a tabletop for board games. But the room’s single greatest surprise is its hidden bar: an alcove revealed by a section of Black Edition’s brand-new ‘Imani’ wallcovering, with its textured surface and grand, almost mythological motif debuted here for the very first time anywhere in the world. The discovery of the bar is a genuinely theatrical moment — exactly the kind of secret that a speakeasy should hold.

A bespoke frieze depicting mythical beasts runs along one wall, adding to the atmosphere of controlled indulgence. A lime-green carpet — an almost shocking counterpoint to all the dark plum and chocolate — offsets the room’s intensity with a wit that only a very confident designer could pull off. The Trove Speakeasy armchair, reimagined in Black Edition velvet, is the piece that Duggan singles out as her favourite: “the contrast of the fabric against the deco-inspired, glossy chocolate arms and ribbed bun feet” achieves exactly the balance between contemporary comfort and vintage glamour that animates the whole room.

Room 11: The Parlour by Martin Kemp Design

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Martin Kemp Design.

The Parlour by Martin Kemp Design is the showhouse’s most explicitly theatrical room — a space that reveals itself gradually, that demands you move through it rather than simply stand in the doorway, that holds its pleasures back until you earn them.

Kemp’s approach was architectural as well as decorative: the room is circular in plan, and suspended panels of fabric partially veil the space so that it presents differently from every angle, revealing and concealing different vignettes as the visitor moves. “A little bit theatrical, intriguing, and not conventional,” is how Kemp himself describes the room — a typically understated summary of something that is in fact quite astonishing.

The circular seating arrangement — two softly curved LaBrea sofas in deep purple, in what is Martin Kemp’s first WOW! House appearance — arranges itself around the room’s centre in what is simultaneously a contemporary conversation pit and an echo of much older, more formal drawing room traditions. A pendant made of semitranslucent concentric panels hangs above the centre, its form echoing the room’s circular geometry while filling the space with a diffuse, atmospheric glow.

The furniture is the product of considerable material care. The Arizona armchairs are upholstered in the Silkbird jacquard by Dedar — a fabric of extraordinary tactile richness — and their upholstery takes on what Kemp describes as “a softness and sense of whimsy that I find incredibly appealing.” The wall sconce by Nick Jones is a silver-plated piece of near-sculptural ambition — “almost tentacular in form,” Kemp says, with the delight of someone who has found exactly the right word — that provides both illumination and drama, its branching form suggesting something half-architectural, half-natural.

Throughout the room, eighteenth-century paintings hang alongside contemporary works, creating the kind of temporal dialogue that animates the very best rooms in WOW! House. Among the art, two paintings from Kemp’s late parents: a detail that transforms the whole composition from something merely beautiful into something personally meaningful. The Wavy wool-and-silk cut-and-loop pile rug by Colbourns features a bespoke ‘desire line’ — a sheared path through the curvy plush that begins at the threshold and wends toward the next room — a subtle navigational device that is also, in its quiet way, a piece of design poetry.

Room 12: Misia for Casamance Group Bedroom Suite by Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay.

The Bedroom Suite by Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay, created in partnership with Misia for Casamance Group, is a room of globe-trotting eclecticism held together by two converging aesthetic commitments: Art Deco formalism and an African-influenced sense of material drama.

Fitzwilliam-Lay designed the room with what he describes as “a free-thinking world traveller” in mind — someone whose tastes have been shaped by multiple cultures and geographies, whose bedroom should speak of curiosity, beauty, travel and the accumulated pleasures of a life lived widely. The result is intentionally, unashamedly eclectic: different periods, different geographies, different registers of ornament all present simultaneously, held together by a palette of warm, earthy tones and a consistent commitment to material quality.

The curtains are Misia’s ‘Riviera du Levant’, a cotton and linen jacquard whose geometric pattern carries both Art Deco precision and, in its bold contrasts, something of the African textile tradition. The fabric is used also to upholster And Object’s ‘Stoke’ stool, in Misia’s ‘Matin Calme’ — a companion piece of similar textural richness.

The room’s most extraordinary detail is its ceiling. Square-block wood moulding by Ebanisteria Marelli forms a coffered grid overhead, into which concrete trays inlaid with verdigris panels are set — an unexpected material combination that produces an effect simultaneously ancient and contemporary, industrial and refined. The fireplace — informed by Brutalism and made by Victoria Stone — provides the room’s other great structural gesture: a work of abstract sculptural conviction whose raw material weight contrasts with the fluid softness of the fabrics.

Vintage finds mix throughout with contemporary pieces, leather suitcases act as decorative objects and bedside tables, and the whole composition is anchored by an underlying sense of personalised narrative — a room that belongs to someone, that tells their story in the language of objects.

Room 13: Ca’ Pietra Bathroom by De Rosee Sa

Photo Courtesy of DCCH. De Rosee Sa.

The second bathroom at WOW! House 2026 is the most architecturally ambitious. Where Rigby & Rigby transported visitors to Scandinavia and Japan through materials and atmosphere, De Rosee Sa — the London-based practice of Max de Rosée and Claire Sá — take their cue from a specific moment in Mediterranean history: a hotel room overlooking the sea in the south of France, in the 1970s, in early summer.

“A nostalgic hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea — a slightly faded and cinematic space evoking early summer light and the promise of warmth,” is how de Rosée and Sá describe their starting point. The aim was “a sensual, transportive atmosphere where you can almost hear the crickets and smell the citrus in the air.”

The material heart of the room is stone, and Ca’ Pietra, the London-based stone specialist who partner the room, were pushed, as Claire Sá explains, “to the limits of what can be achieved in the material.” The double basin sink and bath are wrapped in Versailles Rouge, a Ca’ Pietra marble of extraordinary beauty — a rose-tinted stone with the warmth and softness of late afternoon sunlight on old plaster. On the baseboards and architraves sits the contrasting Fusion Wow quartzite: darker, more dramatic, with veining that provides the room’s visual punctuation. Antwerp cobbles cover the floor, their rough texture underfoot contrasting with the polished surfaces above.

The shower is the room’s architectural masterpiece. It features a circular window uniquely framed in marble — a detail of extraordinary technical ambition that required Ca’ Pietra to work at the very edge of what their material will support. A round-window surround, a profiled stone cornice and a flooring in Ca’ Pietra’s new ‘Pietra Pazza’ — an Italian phrase meaning ‘crazy paving’ — version of their Buscot limestone complete the architectural programme.

A linen awning in the Leo Stripe by Fleurons d’Hélène — a hundred percent linen in a pumpkin colourway — adds the room’s warmth of colour and its final gesture toward the Mediterranean: an awning implies an exterior, a terrace, a heat. Combined with a pair of tapered Murano sconces whose textured ribbed finish casts a diffuse, flattering glow, and a timber butler’s table on contemporary brass ball feet, the Ca’ Pietra bathroom is not merely a bathroom at all. It is, as De Rosee Sa intended, a destination.

Room 14: Zardi & Zardi Withdrawing Room by Sean Symington Design

If the English country house aesthetic has been the most consistent point of reference at WOW! House 2026, then the Zardi & Zardi Withdrawing Room by Sean Symington Design is its most fully realised and joyfully inhabited expression. This is a room that deserves the word “sumptuous” — not as a cliché, but as a precise description of the sensory effect of entering it.

Symington, who lives and works in the Cotswolds, describes his intention with disarming simplicity: “I wanted it to be livable and a home, not a showroom. An elevated English country aesthetic.” What he has achieved is something more complex than that modesty suggests — a room that synthesises multiple traditions, that quotes from multiple centuries, that draws on both British and American sources, and that manages to feel not merely eclectic but cohesive, not merely layered but legible.

The framework is Zardi & Zardi’s archival Primavera print wallpaper — a richly patterned design that sets the room’s whole chromatic tone, its densely woven botanical pattern establishing a mood of abundance and cultivation. Within this framework, Symington assembles furniture and objects with the practiced eye of an experienced antiques dealer: a pair of characterful bookcases — painted in the perfect Sage by Benjamin Moore — display artworks hung from the shelves themselves; antique furnishings sit alongside contemporary pieces; layers of patterned textiles build the kind of depth that only accumulated acquisition can produce.

The tapestry of dancing peasants — a Zardi & Zardi speciality — takes pride of place on one wall, suspended from a Collier Webb picture rail in antique brass whose integrated lighting illuminates the textile from above. “The antique brass finish ties into the wider scheme,” Symington notes, “and integrated lighting illuminates it from above with a warmth that feels genuinely luxurious.” The fringe on sofas and curtains — another contribution to WOW! House 2026’s passementerie story — adds to the layering and gives the room a kind of domestic depth that is simply not achievable with cleaner, more contemporary detailing.

“The Upper East Side meets an English country manor seasoned with a dash of medieval castle,” is how Galerie magazine described the effect. It is an accurate summary, but what makes the room remarkable is not its eclecticism but its authority — the sense that every element has been chosen with absolute certainty.

Room 15: THG Paris Powder Room by Studio Mark Andrew

Photo Courtesy: DCCH. Studio Mark Andrew.

The Powder Room designed by Studio Mark Andrew in partnership with THG Paris occupies a very specific position in the WOW! House sequence: it is the room that demonstrates what can happen when restraint, precision and wit converge in a very small space.

Powder rooms have a long tradition of being the place in any house where decorative rules can be suspended — where wallpaper that might overwhelm a larger space becomes perfectly appropriate, where a chandelier whose scale might seem excessive in a drawing room becomes exactly right, where the concentrated intensity of a jewel box is not merely tolerable but ideal. Mark Partner of Studio Mark Andrew understood this tradition and committed to it.

The room is framed by a coffered mirror ceiling — a device of elegant wit, multiplying the available space visually while adding the Art Deco gravitas that seems, at WOW! House 2026, to be somewhere in the background atmosphere of almost every room. At the mirror ceiling’s centre hangs a dazzling pendant of metallic petals — an ornament that reads differently with each reflection, its facets catching light from different angles as you move around it. On the walls, a pair of flowery glass sconces by Sans Souci add further gleam.

The tap at the basin is the room’s collaborative centrepiece: a bespoke sculptural design created with THG Paris that begins with a fountain-like spout and introduces fluted detailing along its length. The mixed-metal finish — THG Paris’s signature approach, combining different metallic tones in a single piece — is described by Partner as “reminiscent of Cartier details”: fine jewellery thinking applied to architectural hardware. It is also an object whose design has been approached from first principles, not adapted from an existing form.

“We believe bathrooms should feel like an absolute escape,” Partner says — “a sanctuary removed from the everyday, and one of the few spaces where you can be completely alone.” The THG Paris Powder Room achieves this through concentration rather than scale: everything it does, it does within a few square metres, with an intensity that larger rooms find harder to sustain.

Room 16: Nucleus Immersive Room by Russell Sage Studio

Photo Courtesy: DCCH. Russell Sage Studio.

The Nucleus Immersive Room by Russell Sage Studio is WOW! House 2026’s most conceptually ambitious space — and perhaps its most emotionally resonant. It is the room that least resembles anything you have ever seen before, and yet the room that addresses a near-universal human need: the desire to be held, comforted, and surrounded by the specific warmth of memory.

Sage, whose studio specialises in experiential hospitality design, began with a question: what if technology — usually deployed to create cinematic spectacle, to deliver the biggest possible audiovisual experience — were instead used to wrap someone in the most personal, most intimate content possible? What if the memory room you created were made not of generic imagery and generic sound, but of the specific, unremarkable, incalculably precious moments from your own life?

He named the room ‘Momentarium’ — from the Latin *momentarius*, meaning brief or temporary. The architecture of the space is circular, its curved walls covered in linen-based wallpaper and stretched fabric featuring a hand-embroidered and painted design, layered with acoustically transparent sheer curtains that conceal speakers without affecting sound quality. The whole room is an acoustic as well as visual environment, shaped by L-Acoustics Hyriss technology that allows the sound character of the space to shift — intimate, expansive, calm, cinematic — depending on the content being played. “When technology stops feeling like equipment and starts becoming part of the atmosphere,” Sage says, “that is where it becomes truly exciting.”

At the room’s centre — the piece that generated the most conversation, the most delight, and the most social media content of any single object at WOW! House 2026 — is what Sage describes as “an absolutely giant, human-sized dog bed” created especially for the space by George Smith. It is, literally and architecturally, a circular sofa of extraordinary scale and softness, part conversation pit and part oversized human nest, somewhere between a daybed and a domestic sanctuary. “Part 1960s conversation pit and part enormous dog bed,” as Sage himself describes it: “a place to dive into, alone or with friends, where guests could all face each other to chat — or I could take a nap with my pooch, Hugo.”

Around the perimeter, drawers and cupboards contain mementoes: physical objects that stand in for the memories the technology reproduces through image and sound. A dried wildflower arrangement crowns the Fromental-panelled ceiling. The floor is an incredibly soft-underfoot rug that adds one final, tactile dimension to the sensory totality of the room.

The Nucleus Immersive Room is the most personal room in WOW! House 2026 — and paradoxically, it is also the most universal. Because everyone has their equivalent of Hugo’s walks. Everyone has their unremarkable, precious moments. The Momentarium gives physical, architectural form to the idea that those moments are worth honouring.

Room 17: Schumacher Dining Room by Max Rollitt

Photo Courtesy DCCH. Max Rollitt.

From the cocooning intimacy of the Momentarium, WOW! House 2026 pivots dramatically into ceremony: the Schumacher Dining Room by Max Rollitt, one of Britain’s most important designers and antiques dealers, is a room conceived for the rituals of the great dinner table.

Rollitt occupies a unique position in the British design landscape: his furniture workshop produces bespoke furniture directly inspired by antique originals; his antiques business involves sourcing at the highest level; and his interiors practice brings both strands together in rooms of extraordinary coherence, where the relationship between old and new, authentic and adapted, is always calibrated with exceptional precision.

The brief — an 18th-century dining room — was one he embraced with genuine enthusiasm. “I think the biggest challenge was creating a dining room people want to sit in,” he says. “A special place to revel in its beauty.” The architecture of the space draws on the panelled rooms of Georgian England — specifically Uppark House in West Sussex, whose distressed paintwork was colour-matched with extraordinary fidelity by Mathew Bray and Matthew Collins of MBMC Studios.

The walls are lined with Gavotte Brocatelle, an exuberant terra cotta damask from Schumacher, giving the room a warmth and richness of tone that functions perfectly in the dining context. A damask wallcovering is not a neutral choice — it requires conviction, and Rollitt has that in abundance. The custom-made table, dressed in Otti (an ivory silk mohair) and extending to seat twelve, is the room’s civic centrepiece: the table is, in Rollitt’s architectural vocabulary, the heart of the dining room.

A console made by his son Will combines an antique leg discovered at a dealer’s annual swap shop with an antique mahogany top, the missing pieces reverse-engineered from a matching example found at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. The result is a new piece of furniture that is also, in the truest sense, authentic — made of old materials, informed by old evidence, built by hand with the same craft practices that produced the originals. A sea-scroll frieze and period-accurate ornamentation complete the piece.

Don’t miss the dog bed under the console, either — a typically Rollitt detail that grounds the grandeur with a note of gentle domestic humour.

Room 18: Martin Moore Kitchen by Samantha Bartlett

The Martin Moore Kitchen by Samantha Bartlett is the house’s engine room — the kitchen as hearth, as gathering place, as the room around which everything else is organised. In celebrating Martin Moore’s golden anniversary — fifty years of bespoke British kitchen making — Bartlett created a space that is simultaneously a technical showcase and a deeply felt meditation on the meaning of the kitchen in domestic life.

The Legacy collection, developed for Martin Moore’s fiftieth anniversary, provides the kitchen’s architectural framework: bespoke cabinetry with every edge curved, every surface finished to the highest standard. The decision to curve all the cabinet edges and countertop edges throughout gives the room a softness and tactility that kitchens rarely achieve — this is not a room of hard right angles and gleaming industrial surfaces, but a space with the warmth and organic quality of a room that has always been there.

The palette is anchored by matcha green — the particular shade of sage-green that has become 2026’s kitchen colour, appearing in ranges and cabinetry across the country, and represented here in the range oven that functions as the room’s focal point. The muted marble countertops, in their pale, calming greens and creams, reinforce the botanical register that pervades the whole composition. Dark wood accents — in oak, with the warmth and grain of genuinely well-seasoned timber — add depth and contrast.

Above the kitchen, a magical Ivy Shadow Chandelier by Tord Boontje for Porta Romana casts its extraordinary pattern of leafy silhouettes across the room — light filtered through botanical forms, as if the kitchen were a glade rather than a workroom. This single lighting decision transforms the ceiling plane from something neutral into something narrative: the kitchen is not merely a place of cooking but a place of growth, of nature, of the organic cycles that the kitchen has always honoured.

Bartlett commissioned Storytelling Lab to write a poem for the space — a gesture of almost audacious warmth in the context of an interior design event, and one that perfectly captures her understanding of the kitchen as a room of accumulated emotional significance rather than merely mechanical function. The poem ends: “Here, joy is not loud, / but steady — / as the hum of the fridge / and the rhythm of hearts / beating toward dinner.”

Room 19: Perennials and Sutherland Garden Terrace by Fettle Design

The final room in the WOW! House 2026 sequence is the one that stays with you longest — not because it is the most visually complex, but because it achieves a completeness and a warmth that feels like the natural conclusion to everything that has come before.

The Perennials and Sutherland Garden Terrace by Fettle Design — the hospitality-focused interior design practice co-founded and led by Andy Goodwin — is conceived as an Italian villa terrace in midsummer. This is Goodwin’s great skill: the creation, within highly controlled circumstances (no natural light, industrial building infrastructure, a one-month build schedule), of spaces that feel genuinely transported, that have the temperature and atmosphere of places you have actually been and want to return to.

“Our vision will capture the effortless glamour of an Italian villa’s terrace,” he says — “a place that celebrates colour, craft and the simple pleasures of outdoor living.” The collaboration with Perennials and Sutherland — both American brands whose outdoor collections occupy the very top end of the market — gave Goodwin the material palette he needed to realise the dream.

Perennials’ ‘La Dolce Vita’ collection is the hero: a range of outdoor fabrics in the most irresistibly Italian of colourways, combining gingham checks and fruit prints with lemons, pomegranates and the kind of sun-drenched colours — Positano blues and yellows, Amalfi oranges and greens — that immediately evoke the Campania coast. The Al Fresco pattern in the Positano colourway covers the largest upholstered piece in the room, making it the focal point of the composition.

The Nonna pattern — another Perennials design with all the kitchen-table warmth of Italian domestic life — appears on the table layering, while Murano table lamps by Sogni di Cristallo bring the Venetian glass tradition into the composition. The Euridice lamp’s amber glass accents pair with the yellow tones of the marble bar countertop, creating a warm, golden interior light that perfectly simulates the quality of late afternoon sunlight in southern Italy.

A canopy in limoncello-hued check fabric stretches overhead, rippling with light reflected off glittering glass spheres — a device of pure theatre that Goodwin uses to make the absence of natural light an irrelevance. Architectural niches in the walls frame sculptures and greenery, reinforcing the structural interventions trend that runs through the whole showhouse. Sutherland’s outdoor furniture grounds the composition with the kind of material and constructional quality that ensures the whole space reads as genuinely premium rather than merely decorative.

“Italian-inspired, fresh summer colorways,” Goodwin says. “This is evocative of our work as interior designers.” The Garden Terrace sends visitors out of WOW! House into the London summer with the taste of the Mediterranean still in the mind — the best possible conclusion to one of the most accomplished showhouses the event has yet produced.

The Colour Story of WOW! House 2026

No other single aspect of WOW! House 2026 generated more discussion, more editorial coverage or more Instagram posts than its use of colour. This was a showhouse that made bold chromatic statements at almost every turn, and the cumulative colour story it told was both coherent and exciting — a set of clear directions that the design industry will be processing for months to come.

The Return of Playful Primaries

The room that most dramatically articulated this trend was, of course, the Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon by Young Huh, but the direction it represents is broader than a single room can contain. After years during which the dominant palette in high-end interior design tended toward the sophisticated neutrals — warm whites, off-beiges, dusty roses, muted sage — WOW! House 2026 made a compelling argument for colour in its most full-throated, unapologetic form.

Galápagos Turquoise, Citron, Picante, Jade Garden, Magenta — these are not accent colours, not the kind of carefully considered chromatic punctuation marks that sophisticated designers use to “lift” a neutral scheme. They are primary statements, colours that occupy the field of vision completely and demand a response. The fact that they appear together in the Minhwa Salon — in that extraordinary wall of fifty-five painted boxes — gives them both context (they are part of a decorative argument about Korean folk art) and permission (they are shown in a room designed by one of America’s most respected interior designers, in collaboration with one of the world’s leading paint brands).

The lesson the design industry will take from this room is not simply “use bolder colours” — though it will certainly include that instruction — but something more nuanced: colour only achieves its full potential when it carries meaning. The Minhwa Salon’s colours are as vivid as they are precisely because they are not randomly selected; they are the colours of a specific cultural tradition, deployed within a specific scholarly argument, by a designer who has thought deeply about what they mean.

Aubergine: The Colour of 2026

If one hue dominated WOW! House 2026 above all others, it was aubergine — that deep, luscious purple with just enough red undertone to read as warm and indulgent rather than cool and remote. The colour appeared throughout the showhouse in multiple registers: as a primary palette in the Black Edition for Romo Speakeasy Salon by Studio Duggan, where it enveloped the whole room in a deep plum linen-blend wallcovering; as the upholstery of the curved sofas in Martin Kemp’s Parlour; as a grounding note in the Minhwa Salon, where Benjamin Moore’s Grape Juice provided the depth that prevented the brighter colours from floating away; and as an undertone in the dense reds of the Garden Folly Room by Studio Enass.

Industry observers noted that aubergine has been building as a colour direction for several years — appearing in kitchen cabinets and upholstery, in rugs and curtain fabrics — but WOW! House 2026 represents the moment at which it has definitively moved from edgy choice to mainstream standard. “If one shade stood out as the shade of WOW! House 2026, it was aubergine,” reported Homes & Gardens, and the assessment seems correct. Expect to see this colour in every corner of the design market in the months ahead.

Seafoam, Celadon and the Quiet Blues

Against the intensity of the primary palette and the indulgence of aubergine, WOW! House 2026 also offered what might be called the counterargument: the quiet blues and greens of Sara Cosgrove’s Morning Room, where the Phillip Jeffries Aura wallpaper in its watercolour greys, blues and lilacs created an atmosphere of extraordinary calm.

Celadon — the pale, luminous grey-green of Chinese Song Dynasty ceramics, a colour that has been important in Western design since the great chinoiserie craze of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — appears here in a thoroughly contemporary register. Cosgrove’s palette is not chinoiserie; it is something closer to the colour field painting tradition, where hue is experienced as pure sensation, separated from representational content. The Topfloor by Esti rug on the floor reinforces this palette, its woven surface mirroring the mural’s aquatic tones.

The seafoam direction at WOW! House was not simply about a single room. It appeared in the shell-inspired forms of Pure White Lines’ Fiore wall lights, in the soft greens of the Courtyard garden, in the subtle aquatic references that Cosgrove introduced through artwork and ornament as well as wallpaper. Seafoam and celadon are the direction for those who find aubergine too intense — the refinement to the richness, the pause to the drama.

Sage Green Matures in the Kitchen

Sage green has been the dominant interior design colour trend of the early 2020s, appearing in kitchen cabinetry and living room paint choices with increasing frequency. By 2025, there were concerns in the design press that it was becoming ubiquitous to the point of fatigue.

What WOW! House 2026 demonstrated, through the Martin Moore Kitchen by Samantha Bartlett, is that sage green has not exhausted itself — it has simply matured. The matcha green of the kitchen’s range oven is a slightly darker, slightly more complex version of the pale sage that saturated the market two years ago: more herbal, more mineral, more genuinely vegetal. Paired with dark wood tones and pale marble, it achieves something that simpler sage greens could not: genuine warmth without sweetness, sophistication without severity.

In the Zardi & Zardi Withdrawing Room by Sean Symington Design, Benjamin Moore’s Sage paint on the bookcases provided another, slightly different register of the colour: a muddier, more complex green, somewhere between sage and stone, that acts as a neutral foil for the Primavera wallpaper’s rich patterns without reading as a neutral at all.

Mediterranean Warmth

The Mediterranean colour palette — the warm pinks, terracottas, dusty oranges, and sun-bleached creams of the southern European coast — appeared in multiple rooms at WOW! House 2026, and collectively made one of the show’s strongest colour statements.

In the Ca’ Pietra Bathroom by De Rosee Sa, the rose-tinted Versailles Rouge marble, with its warmth of tone and soft, almost skin-like surface quality, set the Mediterranean register against the sharper contrast of the dark-veined Fusion Wow quartzite. In the Perennials and Sutherland Garden Terrace by Fettle Design, the limoncello canopy, the Positano colourway upholstery, the amber Murano glass lamps, and the yellow marble bar countertop together created an Italian summer of colour that needed no sunlight to convince.

The Gavotte Brocatelle terra cotta damask from Schumacher that lined Max Rollitt’s dining room added another facet of the same palette: the deep, earthy warmth of Italian historic interiors, sun-faded and beautiful.

Chocolate, Cognac and the Dark Luxuries

Alongside the Mediterranean warmth, WOW! House 2026 offered a rich vein of dark luxury — the chocolates, cognacs and deep tans that appeared in Studio Duggan’s speakeasy, in the Lalique Home Bar’s warm woodwork and amber crystal, in the Shepel’ Library’s near-black joinery, and in the dining room’s deep terra cotta damask.

These are not cold darks — not the navy blues or charcoal greys that dominated an earlier period of dark-room enthusiasm. They are warm darks, colours with brown and red and amber in them, colours that feel simultaneously opulent and enveloping. The cultural associations are with cognac, tobacco, aged leather, old wood, patinated metal — a vocabulary of sensual luxury that has been building throughout the design world and that WOW! House 2026 confirms is now fully mainstream.

Seven Defining Design Trends From WOW! House 2026

1. Tassels, Trims and Fringe

Passementerie has been on the periphery of the design conversation for several years, appearing in small doses — a trimmed cushion here, a fringed throw there — but WOW! House 2026 represents the moment at which it moved from accent to architectural principle.

The tassel cornice in Albion Nord’s Drawing Room is the most dramatic single expression of this trend: a cornice made entirely of passementerie, replacing plaster with fabric, the built with the applied. But the trend was visible throughout the showhouse in many registers. In the Garden Folly Room by Studio Enass, an emerald-fringed cocktail table sat at the room’s centre, while tassels appeared on bolster cushions, blinds and even wall sconces — an unusual application that suggests how far the passementerie revival has spread. In the Morning Room by Sara Cosgrove, fringe appeared on sofas and soft furnishings. In the Withdrawing Room by Sean Symington Design, tassels decorated the drapes.

The return of passementerie is connected, culturally, to the broader revival of interest in traditional craft and artisanship that has been one of the defining characteristics of luxury interior design in the post-pandemic period. Passementerie is one of the oldest decorative crafts — the braiding, weaving and knotting of silk and wool into trims, tassels, cords and ornaments was a major industry in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France and Italy — and its return signals an appetite for the handmade, the time-consuming and the historically informed.

2. Curves

If WOW! House 2026 has a single defining formal character, it is the curve. Curves appeared in almost every room — curved sofas in the Parlour, the Speakeasy Salon and the Nucleus Immersive Room; curved kitchen cabinetry in the Martin Moore Kitchen; curved walls in the Drawing Room’s octagonal geometry; curved bar counters; curved bed frames; curved lighting pendants.

The sources of this phenomenon are multiple. There is, first, the continuing influence of the organic modernism tradition — the mid-century Scandinavian and Italian design that was exploring biomorphic forms in the 1950s and 1960s and that has been rediscovered over the last decade. There is, second, the general backlash against the hard-edged minimalism that dominated high-end interior design in the early 2010s: curves read as warm where right angles can read as cold, as welcoming where rectangles can read as formal.

But at WOW! House 2026, curves also carried a specific functional argument: in a showhouse designed to demonstrate the potential of domestic space, curves produce a “natural flow” (Studio Duggan’s phrase) that makes multifunctional rooms more psychologically legible, that makes transitions between zones feel organic rather than enforced.

3. Bookshelf Wealth and the Layered Library

“Bookshelf wealth” — the term coined by interior design media to describe the aesthetic of genuinely lived-in, densely accumulated, personally meaningful shelving — was visible throughout WOW! House 2026 in ways that moved the concept beyond its social media origins into something more artistically and architecturally considered.

The Salvesen Graham Primary Bedroom’s bookshelves, with their unhurried mix of actual books and actual objects, artwork propped against spines and visible wear on the covers, represent “bookshelf wealth” in its most authentic register: not styled, not curated for photographic perfection, but simply the accumulated evidence of a reading life.

The Shepel’ Library by Róisín Lafferty took the library concept in a more architectural direction — hidden alcoves, concealed doors, the sense of a room that does not reveal everything at once — while the Schumacher Dining Room by Max Rollitt demonstrated that the library aesthetic can operate even in rooms whose primary function is not reading, through the combination of acquired objects, period furniture and the accumulated presence of things that have been lovingly chosen over many years.

4. Shells and Sea-inspired Forms

Shell motifs and sea-inspired shapes provided one of WOW! House 2026’s most consistent decorative threads. In the Garden Folly Room, the Reverie pendant by Gladee Lighting took its form from the scallop shell; the departure doorway featured a shell mosaic surround. In the Morning Room, a shell ornament on the coffee table and Fiore wall lights with their shell-like milky glass were both overt and subtle expressions of the motif. The Aura mural itself, with its watercolour waves, carried the aquatic suggestion throughout the room’s perimeter.

The shell trend connects to broader currents in contemporary design: the interest in biomimicry (forms derived from natural organisms); the appeal of the imperfect and the organic against the precision of digital production; the resonance of coastal reference in a cultural moment when the natural world feels both precious and threatened.

5. Aubergine as the New Neutral

As noted in the colour section above, aubergine appeared throughout WOW! House 2026 with a frequency and confidence that suggests it is no longer merely a trend but a genuine alternative to the neutral palettes that have dominated high-end interiors for the past decade.

“Moody colours work particularly well in smaller, more intimate spaces where conversation and atmosphere are the priority,” as one designer noted in the Homes & Gardens feature on WOW! House trends. The move toward darker, more enveloping palettes is connected to the broader shift in interior design culture away from Instagram-friendly brightness and toward spaces that prioritise how they feel rather than how they photograph — rooms that are designed to be inhabited rather than observed.

6. Vacation-Inspired Bathrooms

The idea of the bathroom as destination was one of the most clearly articulated trends at WOW! House 2026, and it was expressed with remarkable consistency across the three bathrooms in the showhouse. All three were conceived with a specific place in mind: Scandinavia and Japan (Rigby & Rigby), the Mediterranean 1970s (De Rosee Sa), and Paris at its most jewel-like (Studio Mark Andrew’s Powder Room).

The vacation-bathroom trend reflects a fundamental shift in how we think about bathing spaces. For decades, bathroom design was led by technological innovation and spatial efficiency. The current wave of high-end bathroom design is led by experience — by the question of how a room can transport you, how it can shift your mental state, how it can offer a form of private escape from the conditions of ordinary domestic life. This is, ultimately, the same impulse that drives the great hotel bathroom — the specific luxury of bathing in a room that has been designed entirely for sensory pleasure.

7. Cocooning, Sanctuary and the Art of the Interior Nest

The most pervasive conceptual theme at WOW! House 2026 — visible across rooms as different in style and register as the Nucleus Immersive Room, the Speakeasy Salon, the Morning Room and the Parlour — is what might be called the domestic nest: the room designed not for display, not for entertaining, not for working, but for withdrawing, recovering, and being entirely at rest.

This is cocooning taken to its architectural extreme. The circular spaces, the enveloping fabrics, the dim, intimate lighting, the giant central seating elements designed for sinking into — all of these design decisions point to the same cultural hunger: for spaces that feel genuinely safe, genuinely separate from the demands and the noise of the world outside.

In the Nucleus Immersive Room, this takes its most literal form: a room designed to hold your warmest memories around you while you rest. But the cocooning impulse is present in subtler ways throughout the showhouse — in the drawn drapes of the Speakeasy’s hidden bar, in the suspended panels of the Parlour that reveal the room gradually, in the morning room’s “analogue sanctuary” concept.

WOW! House 2026 is, taken as a whole, a showhouse about refuge. About beauty as comfort. About the domestic interior as the most important space in a complicated world.

Technology and Craft: The Brilliant Balance

One of the most frequently noted characteristics of WOW! House 2026 by those who attended was the way it managed to honour both craft and technology — treating neither as superior to the other, but finding in their relationship a new kind of richness.

The technology was most visibly present in the Nucleus Immersive Room, where L-Acoustics Hyriss spatial audio created an acoustic environment of extraordinary sophistication and humanity. But CEDIA — the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association — was a key event partner, and guided a dedicated tech tour of the house on 18 June that revealed the extent to which technology had been invisibly integrated throughout WOW! House 2026. Smart home systems managed lighting, temperature, and atmosphere in multiple rooms; acoustic technology was embedded behind fabric in the Immersive Room; climate control by Calibre Climate maintained comfort throughout the building.

The crucial distinction that WOW! House 2026 drew — and that the CEDIA tech tour made explicit — was between technology as experience and technology as function. The worst integration of technology into interior spaces tends toward the visible and the ostentatious: screens, speakers and controls that announce their presence in rooms that would be better without them. The best integration, as demonstrated throughout WOW! House 2026, is invisible: technology that serves the room’s emotional and atmospheric intentions, that enhances rather than interrupts.

Craft was the other great value that the showhouse honoured. From the Shepel’ joinery of Róisín Lafferty’s library to the Fromental hand-painting in Young Huh’s salon; from the Ceccotti textiles in Rigby & Rigby’s bathroom to the bespoke Victoria Stone fireplaces that appeared in multiple rooms; from the passementerie cornice in Albion Nord’s drawing room to the carved gilded triptych in Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay’s bedroom — the entire showhouse was suffused with the conviction that the handmade is irreplaceable.

The Events Programme

WOW! House 2026 was not only a visual experience but an educational one. Throughout the month of June and into early July, as you would expect from any interior design show, an extensive programme of talks, tours and events were held, that allowed visitors to go deeper into the creative process behind each room.

The twice-daily WOW! House guided tours — running Monday to Saturday at 10am and 2pm — allowed visitors to gain extra insights into the creativity behind each room, with guides who could explain the conceptual framework, the material choices, and the brand partnerships that produced each space. These tours were included with ticket price and required no additional booking.

The Design Discovery Tours, running every Monday at noon, took visitors beyond the WOW! House rooms themselves and into the wider Design Centre Chelsea Harbour — the 135+ showrooms that surrounded the showhouse — offering an insider’s perspective on the brands and products that had been chosen for this year’s rooms.

A highlight of the programme was the WOW! House Colour Tour with Benjamin Moore, which ran on Wednesday 10 June, led by Andrea Magno, the brand’s director of colour marketing and development. This exclusive tour gave participants the inside track on the colour decisions behind each room — not merely which colours had been used, but how those decisions had been made, what the designers had been trying to achieve, and how paint could be used to create the specific atmospheric effects seen throughout the showhouse.

The CEDIA Tech Tour on 18 June offered a rare opportunity to see behind the technical architecture of the house — the smart home systems, spatial audio installations, lighting controls and climate management that had been embedded throughout the rooms. Led by CEDIA members who had collaborated with the WOW! House designers, this tour made explicit what was otherwise invisible: the extent to which technology was present throughout the showhouse, serving its emotional and atmospheric intentions from behind the walls.

Sally Storey of John Cullen Lighting — one of Britain’s most respected lighting designers — led the lighting tour on 22 June, giving visitors the inside track on how illumination had been used throughout WOW! House 2026 as an integral design element rather than a purely functional utility. Lighting, she explained, is the design decision that most directly shapes how a room is experienced — and the WOW! House lighting schemes, from the amber glow of the Lalique bar to the leafy silhouettes cast by the Tord Boontje chandelier in the kitchen, repaid sustained attention.

Throughout the month, more than twenty WOW! Talks ran in showrooms across the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, with designers discussing their rooms in detail, showing concept work, and engaging with questions from visitors who were often professional designers themselves. These talks allowed the creative thinking behind the rooms to be shared in a depth impossible to access from the rooms alone.

United in Design: Creativity with a Conscience

WOW! House 2026 was not merely a showcase of exceptional interior design. It was also an act of active philanthropy, with United in Design named as the event’s charity partner for the year.

United in Design is a London-based initiative working to address the diversity gap in the interior design industry — a sector that has historically been overwhelmingly white and socioeconomically homogenous, with access to training and employment limited by networks, geography and financial barriers. Through mentorship, bursaries, educational partnerships and the simple act of making professional design networks visible and accessible to people who would not otherwise encounter them, United in Design works to change who gets to become a designer in Britain.

The alignment between United in Design’s mission and WOW! House’s own trajectory felt particularly meaningful in 2026. The showhouse this year included Studio Enass — whose Next in Design win was itself a product of the kind of talent-recognition programme that matters to the industry — as well as a roster of designers who collectively demonstrated the diversity of background, geography, cultural reference and aesthetic sensibility that makes British interior design as vibrant as it currently is.

A portion of every ticket sale contributed to United in Design, while the opening-night WOW! Gala on 1 June raised additional funds through the attendance and generosity of the design industry at its most celebratory. For a showhouse that is fundamentally about beauty, creativity and aspiration, the partnership with United in Design adds a dimension of intention that elevates the whole enterprise: the conviction that those qualities should be available to everyone with the talent to exercise them.

What WOW! House 2026 Tells Us About British Interior Design

Five years of WOW! House has produced enough evidence to permit some broader conclusions about the state of British interior design — not just as it was in June 2026, but as a tradition and a practice that continues to evolve.

The first conclusion is that British interior design is, in 2026, genuinely international. The designers at WOW! House this year came from the UK, Ireland, the US and beyond; they drew on Korean folk art, North African domestic traditions, Mediterranean culture, Scandinavian wellness practice, Japanese craft, Art Deco Parisian glamour and the English country house all within the compass of a single showhouse. This is not eclecticism for its own sake; it is the natural expression of a design culture that is both deeply rooted in its own traditions and genuinely permeable to the world.

The second conclusion is that craft has never been more valued. The investment in bespoke joinery, handmade textiles, custom hardware, artisan stonework and commissioned artworks throughout WOW! House 2026 represents a commitment to craft that would have seemed almost quaint a decade ago, when the dominant design conversation was about flat-pack democratisation and the aesthetics of the homogenous. In 2026, the handmade is the luxury, and the aspiration is not to make beautiful things affordable but to make them more completely, more honestly beautiful.

The third conclusion is that the home has become, in the cultural moment we inhabit, the most important space most people will ever occupy. The themes of cocooning, sanctuary, memory and sensory retreat that pervade WOW! House 2026 are not merely interior design preferences; they are cultural responses to genuine conditions of stress, overload and uncertainty. Designers who understand this — who design rooms that genuinely hold and comfort their inhabitants — are doing something more than making beautiful spaces. They are making life better.

The fourth conclusion is that colour is back — not merely as accent, not merely as decorative gesture, but as the primary vehicle of meaning in a room. The Minhwa Salon made this argument most explicitly, but the whole showhouse supported it: colour, deployed with knowledge and intention, is as serious a design tool as proportion, material or light.

The fifth and final conclusion is simply this: WOW! House gets better every year. The ambition is greater, the execution more assured, the conceptual range wider, the talent deeper. As Claire German said at the opening, “every year the designers get more ambitious, the build gets more complex, and they deliver with aplomb.” It is hard to argue with that assessment. If the fifth year is this good, the future is very good indeed.

The Complete Designer and Room List: WOW! House 2026

For reference, the full roster of designers, rooms and brand partners:

Architecture & Exterior

- Garden Folly Facade & Size Group Facade: Darren Price, Adam Architecture (with Hector Finch lighting; Size Group construction)

- Artorius Faber Entrance Garden: The Gardenists (Hay Hwang and Simon Kitchin)

Interior Rooms

- Garden Folly Room: Studio Enass (Enass Mahmoud) / Phillip Jeffries

- Entrance Hall: Francis Sultana

- Turnell & Gigon Group Drawing Room: Albion Nord (Camilla Clarke and Ben Johnson)

- Lalique Home Bar: Elicyon (Charu Gandhi)

- Shepel’ Library: Róisín Lafferty

- Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon: Young Huh

- Phillip Jeffries Morning Room: Sara Cosgrove

- Samuel Heath Primary Bathroom: Rigby & Rigby (James Ashfield and Jason Stewart)

- Salvesen Graham The Collection Primary Bedroom: Salvesen Graham (Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham)

- Munder Skiles Courtyard: Richard Miers Garden Design

- Black Edition at Romo Speakeasy Salon: Studio Duggan (Tiffany Duggan)

- The Parlour: Martin Kemp Design

- Misia for Casamance Group Bedroom Suite: Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay

- Ca’ Pietra Bathroom: De Rosee Sa (Max de Rosée and Claire Sá)

- Zardi & Zardi Withdrawing Room: Sean Symington Design

- THG Paris Powder Room: Studio Mark Andrew (Mark Partner)

- Nucleus Immersive Room: Russell Sage Studio

- Schumacher Dining Room: Max Rollitt

- Martin Moore Kitchen: Samantha Bartlett

- Perennials and Sutherland Garden Terrace: Fettle Design (Andy Goodwin)

Event Partners

Benjamin Moore, Hector Finch, Calibre Climate, Jo Malone London, CEDIA, Abels Moving Services, Corston Architectural Detail, Vispring, Colefax and Fowler, 1stDibs, Zimmer & Rohde, Christie’s, Harvey Nichols, BIID, Collect, The Decorative Fair, QEST

Charity Partner

United in Design

Media Partners

World of Interiors, House & Garden, Livingetc, ELLE Decoration, Homes & Gardens, Country Life, Country & Town House, SheerLuxe, The Insider, Hotel Designs, The List (House & Garden)

Why WOW! House Matters

There is a question, occasionally asked of events like WOW! House, about relevance: in a world of Pinterest boards and Instagram reels and virtual tours, in a world where you can look at a hundred rooms before breakfast without leaving the house, why does it matter to go and stand inside a showhouse in Chelsea?

The answer that WOW! House 2026 provides is the same answer it has always provided, but it has never been more vividly demonstrated than this year: because looking at a picture of a room is not the same as being in one.

You cannot smell the Japanese cedarwood in Rigby & Rigby’s bathroom from a photograph. You cannot feel the remarkable softness of the rug underfoot in the Nucleus Immersive Room from a screen. You cannot experience the gradual revelation of Martin Kemp’s Parlour as you move through the suspended fabric panels, because the suspended panels do not exist in a photograph — only the final frame does, and the final frame without the journey is a different thing entirely.

WOW! House 2026 is an argument for the irreplaceable experience of physical space. And by extension, it is an argument for the interior designer’s irreplaceable role in creating it. A room is not a mood board made real; it is a complex sensory, spatial, emotional and material event that can only be fully designed by someone who thinks in all those dimensions at once.

The twenty-two rooms of WOW! House 2026 were created by more than twenty designers, each bringing their own vision, their own cultural references, their own material preferences, their own understanding of what a room is for. Together, they made something that is greater than the sum of its parts: a showhouse that is also a manifesto, a trade event that is also a work of collaborative art, a month-long exhibition that is also a very serious argument about the meaning and the value of the well-designed home.

As Tim Gosling once said of WOW! House: “The Oscars of the design world.” He was right when he said it, and he is more right now than ever.

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*WOW! House 2026 ran at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour from 2 June to 2 July 2026. The sixth edition will be announced in due course.